


let the love tear us apart, I've found the cure for a broken heart

by bookishandbossy



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV), Daredevil (TV), Gossip Girl, Nashville (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Drabbles, Fluff, Gen, Humor, Missing Scene, Multiple Pairings, Occasional angst, Tumblr Prompts
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-05-18
Updated: 2017-02-23
Packaged: 2018-03-31 03:57:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 103
Words: 38,127
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3963511
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bookishandbossy/pseuds/bookishandbossy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A collection of drabbles and Tumblr ficlets, mostly centered around Fitzsimmons.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. AOS Actually (Fitzsimmons--Love Actually AU)

“Welcome to Number 10, Madam Prime Minister.” Bobbi said, sweeping her up in a fierce hug. There was an entire phalanx of uniformed staff standing in front of her, all of them beaming like she was singlehandedly going to save the nation. Which she supposed she was going to. “How are you feeling?” Bobbi asked.

“Powerful. Terrified. But mostly powerful,” Jemma replied. “I feel like I ought to be barking commands and taking stands on things. Politely.”

“I’m sure we can arrange that.” Bobbi whipped out one of her ever-present legal pads. “Would you like to meet your household staff first?”

“Yes, that would be love—”

“Fuck shit piss-poor bloody wanker bastard.” A stream of curses came from the top of the stairs as a curly-haired Scot came—or, more accurately, fell—down them, bearing a tea tray that seemed to have upended itself over his trousers. He froze as well as he could mid-fall when he saw Jemma, and looked up from where he was sprawled at the bottom of the stairs. “Sorry,” he gasped out. “Jemma. Ms. Simmons. Madam Prime Minister. Oh god, I knew I was going to fuck this up.”  
***  
Jemma looked up from the white paper she was reading just in time to see him set down a tray of chocolate biscuits and called after him. “Fitz, wait.” He turned in the doorway and she took a deep breath, folding her hands in her lap so they would stop tapping against the desk. “I was thinking that maybe you could tell me a little more about yourself. We’re, um, doing research. Important research on the British population,” she added quickly. Calm and composed, that was the key. Prime ministers did not get flustered.

“Well. Um. I’m Scottish. Obviously. My family were a bit surprised when I took the job but they like you much better than the previous bloke so…So do I. Like you better than the previous bloke, I mean. You’ve got great taste in biscuits.” He was turning bright red now.

“Where do you live in London?” she asked brightly.

“Herne Hill. One of the dodgy bits.”

“With a wife? Girlfriend? Live-in lover?” Did people even have live-in lovers? Had that even been a prime minister appropriate question?

“No, I just broke up with my girlfriend recently.” Fitz turned an even brighter shade of red and tapped his hand nervously against his trousers. “She, ah…she said that I reminded her too much of a sad puppy to be a decent shag.”

“I’m sure that you’re a great shag!” Jemma said enthusiastically. Perhaps a tad too enthusiastically. “I mean that…that’s awful. Really heartbreaking. I’ve got MI5 on the other end of this line, if you like? They can ensure that she’s stuck at the end of every queue for the next five years.”

“That would be, um,” They would have stood there staring at each other for the next ten minutes if his pager hadn’t buzzed, the two short beeps of a Bobbi summons. “I’ve got to…well, yeah. Good night, Jemma.”

“Good night, Fitz.” As he left the room, her eyes firmly glued to a slightly indecent part of his body, she could have sworn that she felt the painted glare of Winston Churchill’s portrait on her.

“Shut it,” she told the portrait.  
***  
Apparently President Hand had decided to adopt a new model of Anglo-American relations. One which involved her presidential hand on Fitz’s arse. Jemma coughed. Loudly. The president didn’t even have the decency to look abashed when she turned to face Jemma, although Fitz looked like he wanted to melt into the floor and disappear.

Jemma smiled politely and offered President Hand tea, but inside she was seething. After a day of negotiations where the president had refused to compromise on everything from their policy towards Russia to Jemma’s own signature green energy initiative, how dare President Hand feel entitled to touch _Jemma’s_ Fitz? No. 10’s Fitz, she meant. After all, Jemma had a duty to protect her employees from untoward advances from handsy Americans.

She fumed through the rest of the afternoon, through every one of Hand’s smug remarks and smugger declarations of “absolutely not”, through another three meetings and two cups of tea, all the way until their joint press conference. As from a great distance, she heard President Hand talking about getting what they came for and then, suddenly, Jemma snapped. She heard completely unplanned words coming out of her mouth, words about relationships and bullying and Americans taking what they want. Then, somehow, she was talking about Shakespeare and the Beatles and Harry Potter, and the British legacy, and quoting JK Rowling at the press corps. “In the future, I myself am prepared to be much stronger,” she said. “And I hope that the president will be prepared for that, and prepared to correct a relationship that has gone off course.”

Half the press corps was gaping at her, Bobbi looked like she was torn between having a panic attack and cheering and Fitz…Fitz looked like he might be smiling.  
***  
Jemma couldn’t stop staring at the Christmas card on her desk. Her name was on the front in Fitz’s handwriting and it was practically begging her to read it. Stop it, she told the card. The card refused to do so.

Finally, she gave up and tore it open. _Dear Jemma, it read. (Please don’t set MI5 on me for calling you that.) I wanted to apologize for what happened with the American president last week. She bloody terrifies me, to be honest, and I didn’t want to cause an international incident. But since it’s nearly Christmas (and at Christmas, you tell the truth), I wanted to say that, well, all I want for Christmas is you. If you wouldn’t object? Yours, Fitz._

“Bobbi!” Jemma shouted, staring down at the card in a daze.

“Yes?” Bobbi materialized in the doorway almost instantly.

“We’re going to Herne Hill. The dodgy bit.”  
***  
Why did the dodgy bit have to be quite so large? Jemma sighed in frustration as she stared at what seemed like an endless line of doors. “Explain to me why I didn’t just look up his address while I had access to a frighteningly comprehensive government database?”

“You wanted to be romantic.” Bobbi shrugged. “You take the right side and I’ll take the left?”

“All right.” Jemma put on her brightest smile, straightened her tastefully holiday appropriate scarf, and knocked on the first door. “Excuse me? Does Fitz happen to live here?”

“No,” The elderly woman blinked at her. “Are you who I think you are?”

“It’s a pilot program. Personalized polling. So, do you think everything’s going all right with the country? Yes? No? Great! Happy holidays!” Jemma exclaimed. One door down, a hundred and nineteen left to go…

She finally found Fitz forty-three houses later, after being given directions by a girl wearing a flower dress and a gold necklace, and took a deep breath— _you’re the prime minister, Jemma_ —and knocked on the door. It swung open to reveal chaos and a slightly scruffy man who stopped mid-complaint (something about people stealing his Dairy Milk bars) to stare at a spot half a foot above Jemma’s head and exclaim accusingly “You!”

Bobbi didn’t even have the grace to look sheepish. “Me,” she said cheerfully and waved, adding in a whisper to Jemma. “Almost ex-husband.”

“How can you have an almost–” Jemma stopped, refocused, and fixed the man with her best prime ministerial look. “I was wondering if you could tell me if Fitz lives here?”

“He does, yeah. Should be down in a moment. We’re all going to Trip’s niece’s nativity pageant,” he explained and stuck his hand out. “I’m Lance. The guy with all the presents is Trip–”

“Also known as the best uncle ever,” Trip said from behind a pile of presents. “This is the year that I finally beat my brother out for the title. Even helped make my niece’s octopus costume.”

“The guy looking bored is Idaho, the one trying to repair that bit of our living room wall—it got knocked down by accident, I swear—is Mack,” Lance continued. “And that–”

“Which one of you bloody idiots has my fucking jumper?”

“Should be Fitz.” Lance said and stepped aside to let Jemma in. She crossed to the base of the stairs to look up at Fitz, mouth still hanging open as he spotted her, eyes wide and tie hanging loosely around his neck.

“Hi,” she said. He continued to stare at her. “I got your card. It was very nice.” He was still staring at her, though he’d managed to close his mouth. “So I, er, I came here. I realized—rather suddenly—that I just needed…you.”

Jemma wasn’t sure what she had expected after she said it. But whatever she had expected certainly didn’t involve being enlisted to chauffeur an entire carload of men to Trip’s niece’s pageant, having Lance firmly plant himself between her and Fitz and tell her all about being almost-married to Bobbi, and (quite literally) bumping into her sister when she got out of the car.

“Jemma!” Skye said and hugged her a little too tightly. When she pulled back, Jemma noticed that Skye’s eyes were red-rimmed and puffy and that her normally perfect eyeliner was smudged. “I’m so glad–” Skye took a deep breath and pasted on a bright smile. “So glad that you’re here! The kids will be thrilled to see their aunt.”

“Yes, of course,” Jemma managed and gestured vaguely at Fitz. “I just had to pick up my catering manager. He’s absolutely essential.”

“ _Essential_ , hmm? Watch out—five years ago, my sister would have had you into her office for a few private strategy sessions, if you know what I mean.” Skye said to Fitz, voice still too bright and high. She leaned in to give Jemma two cheek kisses and another hug. “Grant already has our seats inside—I should probably be going. I’ll see you later?” Skye was off before Jemma could say anything more, weaving her way through the crowd with a seemingly delighted cry of “Phil!” as she greeted a balding man and his small blond son.

“I didn’t know you had a sister,” Fitz said quietly. “I think that I’d like to know a lot more about you.”

“Everyone knows about me. Just pick up a newspaper,” Jemma shrugged.

“I don’t think I could find the things I want to know in a newspaper.” He held out a hand to her. “There’s somewhere you could watch from backstage, if you don’t want to make a fuss?” Jemma nodded and took it, letting him lead her backstage to huddle behind a curtain. They were still holding hands, she realized, as she peered around the curtain to see one of her nieces dressed up like a lobster, and she had no intention of letting go. His hand was warm in hers and he really was awfully close…and the music playing was certainly right for the occasion…and fuck it all, she was the prime minister.

She kissed him like she knew he would kiss her back, long and soft and with the promise of something more hidden in it. And, because Jemma Simmons was quite frequently right, he did.


	2. Goodwill to All Men (And Cranberry Jello)--Tripskye

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A Thanksgiving drabble for Tripskye week on Tumblr.

Skye knew when Trip dropped a plate that something was wrong. It was a simple fact of life that Antoine Triplett looked cool in any and every situation, and in the past hour he’d dropped two plates, forgotten to tie his shoelace, and even let her sneak up on him. 

“Hey,” she said carefully, wrapping her arms around his waist and leaning her head against his shoulder. “What’s the matter? Did you find how many Koenig brothers there really are?” Trip shuddered–it had officially become too weird to talk about once the fifth one appeared.

“Better than that. Great, actually,” he grinned down at Skye, one of those impossibly brilliant flirty smiles that were reserved just for her. “I just…I have some news for you. Good news. Great news.”

“Is Thor coming to visit again?” she asked eagerly.

“No, but my family is. For Thanksgiving. In a week. Surprise,” he winced. “They only told me about two hours ago. But they’re going to love you, I promise.” On the counter, a glass shook and Skye’s eyes went wide.

“Despite the fact that my dad was kind of a supervillain, I used to be a hacker living in a van, and I can make the earth shake? And all I know how to make for Thanksgiving is cranberry Jello?” she added quickly.

“They’ll love you because I love you,” he said simply and leaned down to kiss her, warm and solid and hers. “And because you happen to be a superhero. My family are suckers for superheroes. Just ask my cousin Sharon.” He kissed her again, long enough that Hunter coughed loudly from his corner. “But I’d take you over Capatin America any day.”


	3. "Do you ever think we should just stop?"--Fitzsimmons

“Do you ever think we should stop this?” They’re sitting on opposite sides of a lab bench, knees drawn up to their chests as they lean against it, and the air is full of everything they’ve said and everything they haven’t. There’s shattered glass somewhere, the echo of voices still shouting off the walls, and neither of them can bring themselves to clean it up.

“Stop what?” he asks her.

“All of this,” she waves a hand around the lab. “All the lying and secrets and fighting and going in circles and circles until we can’t hear themselves think.”

He wants to say that she was the one who lied, who left, who changed first but he wonders what the use would be in saying it. So instead he just tips his head back against the table and says carefully to her “We can’t erase the past, Jemma. Rewind back to that day we got partnered up in chem lab and start all over again, skip forward to the good parts and over the bad.”

“I know,” she replies, even though she’s begging him to tell her why they can’t just go back to who they used to be. But she knows better than that–they’re different now, different in a way that can never be undone–and she knows that time only moves forward. That, if she wants to end this silence between them, the only thing she can do is move forward. “I’m sorry,” she blurts out. 

“I’m sorry, too. Jemma,” he says after a minute. “Come here?” She moves around the lab bench and wraps her arms around him, without even thinking about it, and they sit there for a long while, her head on his shoulder and him wrapped around her like he can shield her from whatever’s coming next, two lost children who had to grow up and (who maybe) are on the edge of being found.


	4. "Do you ever think we should just stop?"--Fitzsimmons (Fluffy version)

“You know that we’re breaking all kinds of rules,” Jemma panted and tried to hide her smirk. Fitz had come straight into her room after he got back from his conference that night, grumbling about delayed flights and idiot aeronautics engineers right before he’d picked her up, pinned her against the wall, and kissed her practically senseless. “Very official rules in the SHIELD handbook and everything. Made by important, regulatory people who could potentially assign us to work somewhere in Siberia if they found out.”

“Technically it’s not against the rules,” Fitz pointed out in between kissing his way down her neck, wrapping his arms around her waist to bring her even closer. “There’s no rule that specifically says you can’t sleep with your lab partner for scientific purposes. I have terrible insomnia and you’re working on a cure.”

“I’m not sure it’s entirely scientifically ethical,” she teased, leaning forward and going up on the tips of her toes to kiss him, long and deep until she could hear him mumble her name against her mouth. “Motivating the subject with rather explicit promises?”

“Best kind of motivation I ever heard of.” Fitz kissed her again, one hand coming up to tangle in her hair while the other one teased at the buttons of her shirt. Jemma sighed and melted into him, only to squeak indignantly when he suddenly went still against her and pulled away, blue eyes wide with worry. “Jemma—you still—have you ever thought that we should just stop this? Because if you have, we can stop, I promise. No more after-hours lab sex or storage closet making out or even—”

“Fitz,” she said firmly. “I don’t want to stop. Not…not ever. In fact,” she gave him a slight shove, sending him toppling backwards onto her bed. “I think that I want you to convince me that breaking the rules feels even nicer than following them.”


	5. "Come home with me"--Fitzsimmons

“Come home with me,” Fitz blurted out. They’d been studying in the library together, her frowning down at her notes and biting on her pen in a way that made him fidget in his seat beside her. “For spring break. I mean it won’t really be spring in Scotland, because it’ll be cold and rainy and generally kind of nasty but you could meet my mum and my family and eat a deep fried Twinkie. Well, you probably won’t eat the deep fried Twinkie but Scotland! Moors and tartan and…stuff.” He shut his mouth with an audible snap and wondered why Jemma hadn’t stopped him yet.

“You want me to meet your family?” Jemma asked slowly.

“You’re my best friend,” he said simply. The madly in love thing could come later. “Besides, my mum’s been bothering me about when she gets to meet you for ages.”

“Really?” Jemma smiled at him, bright and broad, and he remembered that she hadn’t had many friends either. Knowing Jemma, she’d probably tried to take samples off her friends in primary school. 

“Yeah, she’ll probably make you a sweater and everything. It’ll be hideous, just so you know, but if you just smile and say that you love it, we can bury them somewhere,” he promised. “So you mean it? You’ll really come to visit?”

“Of course, Fitz. It’s not like I’m going to let the second smartest person in the Academy get away now,” she teased and leaned over to quickly kiss his cheek. And, feeling the jolt of warmth from her lips shoot through him, watching her smile and not even bothering to correct her about the second smartest thing, Fitz thought that if she’d let him, he’d stay around for as long as possible.


	6. Sugar and Salt (Fitzsimmons)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “you come into my 24hr diner at the oddest times bc of your weird job but you keep forgetting that we talk because youre always sleep deprived” AU, but with Fitz thinking Jemma is a hallucination? (as prompted by agent-85)

_Double espresso, peach pie a la mode_

“Are you sure you can’t put another shot of espresso in here?” Fitz asked, holding up his cup and giving the waitress his best puppy dog eyes. “There’s room.”

“Caffeine is bad for you,” she said sternly. “As is all that sugar. Are you sure you don’t want a salad with that?”

“Salad at three am?” Fitz grimaced.

“No time like the present,” the waitress—her name tag said Jemma—said and shot him a bright smile. “We even have one with apples and cheese—you’ll barely notice that it’s a salad.” And maybe because it was three am and he couldn’t see straight, or maybe just because he wanted to see her smile again, he said yes.

He shut his eyes to take another sip of coffee and when he opened his eyes again, she was gone, no trace of her anywhere in the diner. Great. Fitz heaved a huge sigh. Now he was hallucinating waitresses.

(He didn’t notice the salad sitting in front of him, or the napkin tucked underneath it, her phone number printed in perfect copperplate.)

_Onion rings, bacon cheeseburger, chocolate milkshake_

“Why do you always come in at three am?” Jemma asked as she set the milkshake down in front of him. “Normally, all we get at this hour is long-haul truckers and hung-over clubbers.”

“I’m working on my phD,” he said around a mouthful of onion rings. “But pretty much everyone else in the lab is my senior, so I only get lab time late at night. I’m making DWARFS.”

“Dwarfs?” she leaned over the booth to peer at his notebook. “Like in Snow White?”

“Drones! Seven of them, and they all do different things. Not sure what but…” he shrugged.

“Let me see. Trust me,” she said when he grabbed for his notebook protectively. “I’ve already got my phD.” Three hours later, they had twenty pages of notes, twelve potential applications, seven names for seven DWARFS, and one very wobbly prototype.

If she was a hallucination, she was a pretty brilliant one.

(This time, he noticed the eggplant sandwich but not her notebook, shoved in between the corner of the seat and the back of the booth.)

_Lemonade, peanut butter chocolate pie_

“I got the grant!” he told her, leaping up from the booth when he saw her come by. “SHIELD wants to put the DWARFS into mass production.” Fitz was about to tell her thank you (even though she wasn’t real, his mother had brought him up to always say thank you) when she kissed him.

She was warm and fit inside the circle of his arms perfectly and tasted sweeter than any dessert ever could and for a while, he let himself pretend that it was real.

(Later, when he threw his shirt in the direction of the hamper, he didn’t notice how it still smelled slightly of her perfume.)

_Prosciutto and mozzarella sandwich, with a hint of pesto aioli_

Two days later, Trip suggested going to Fitz’s three am diner. (“If it’s good at three in the morning, imagine how good it’s gonna be at noon.”) And Jemma was there.

She nearly dropped three plates when she saw him. He pinched himself to make sure he wasn’t dreaming and she was still there. Pinched himself again, hard enough to leave a mark, and now she was giving him an odd look.

“You’re real,” he blurted out. “Really real.”

“What else would I be?”

“I thought that you were, um, a hallucination,” he said weakly. “I’d turn around and you’d be gone, and it was some ungodly hour of the morning, and you were kind of too good to be true so…”

“So, theoretically, what would I have to do to convince you that I’m real?” Jemma smiled shyly at him, glancing up from under her eyelashes to give him a look that reminded him of heart emojis. Was that her flirting with him? Oh God. It was and he had no idea what to say.

“You could, um—you could kiss me again?”

“You know,” Jemma said thoughtfully. “I think I just might be able to manage that.”

(This time, he noticed _everything_.)


	7. Dial a Damsel in Distress (Fitzsimmons)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A ‘I called the wrong number and started talking about my life and you only interrupted me after a few a few minutes of me revealing some pretty personal stuff and now you're invested in my life troubles’ AU.

“Skye,” Jemma wailed. “Skye, please please pick up. I know that you don’t answer your phone because of weird stuff with the government but I promise you can wipe my phone records afterward, okay?” The ringing stopped and she heard a click on the other end of the line. “Oh, thank god,” she blurted out and then rushed on before Skye could even say hello. 

“I’m fairly sure I’ve just had the worst day in the history of recorded time. First, when I got into work this morning, Bakski told me that my grant didn’t get approved. ‘Lack of practical applications’, or some completely bullshit like that. I’ve been working on GH325 for years, Skye, and I’m so close to fixing it. If they just gave me money for one more round of tests…it could help people instead of hurting them.” On the other end of the line, Skye hummed sympathetically. “So then, of course, during lunch I went to see Grant. To talk to him about it and see if maybe he could help. Only he broke up with me before I could say anything. He met this florist who reads tarot cards in her spare time and apparently it’s twue wuv.” Jemma’s voice practically dripped with sarcasm. “Not that I wanted true love with Grant, but it would have been nice to have _someone_. Someone who tried. He patted me on the head after he broke up with me, did you know that? Told me to have a nice life and just patted me on the head like a–”

“Grant sounds like a right asshole.” The voice on the other end of the line said and Jemma froze. The last time she checked, Skye didn’t have a Scottish accent.

“You’re not Skye,” Jemma said slowly.

“You didn’t really give me a chance to say so.” 

“You could’ve just hung up. Why didn’t you?” she demanded. There was an awkward silence on the other end of the line, then a long sigh.

“My friend Hunter, he, um, he says that I have a thing for damsels in distress. And I thought that the least I could do was listen.” The guy–definitely a guy, Jemma realized–said.

“I’m not a damsel in distress,” Jemma snapped. “What were you going to do–trace my phone, track me down, and offer to punch my ex-boyfriend and my boss out with your mighty fists?” 

“The last time I punched something I broke my own hand, so no,” the guy said. Jemma could practically hear him wince over the phone. “But I–my boss–my boss has been looking for a way to fix GH325 for a long time. For a friend. He’d probably show up at your door with cupcakes and a new car if he found out how close you are to fixing it.”

“What kind of place do you work at?”

“Stark Industries. In their engineering division. I’m kind of in charge of it,” he said sheepishly. “It’s, uh, it’s a thing. A really cool thing, I swear.”

“I know who you are,” Jemma breathed. “ Leo Fitz–I read that profile of you in the _Times_. And you’re going about your night-night gun wrong.”

“I am not!”

“Yes, you are,” she said matter-of-factly. “The most effective way to knock someone out would be a dendrotoxin. You’d have to experiment with the dosage, of course, but if you performed sufficient trials, you’d be able to find range of doses that would knock someone out for up to four hours without any adverse side effects.”

“So, damsel in distress,” The guy– _Fitz_ –said happily. “What’s your favorite kind of cupcakes?”


	8. She Loves You (Fitzsimmons)

“Jemma,” he tries. She’s curled up on the couch, barely awake but she’s got a simulation running and she’s decided that she needs to be there when she finishes. “Jemma, it’s three in the morning. The simulation still has seven hours to go.”

“Exactly!” she says brightly. Or tries to–the effect’s kind of ruined by the massive yawn. “Only seven hours to go.”

“Jemma, you need to sleep.” Fitz leans over to press a soft kiss to her cheek and notices the way that she instantly co-opts his arm as a pillow. “The simulation’ll still be there in the morning. Promise.”

“But it won’t be the same,” she pouts at him. Actually pouts, and it’s adorable.

“It will. I’ve set a minion on it and they’ll come wake us up if anything important happens,” he tells her firmly. “If you go to bed now, I’ll even make pancakes in the morning.”

“Chocolate chip?” she asks suspiciously.

“Of course.” He holds out his arms to her, offering to pull her up, but she just snuggles into him and makes a happy noise that sounds a little like purring as she plants a kiss at the open collar of his shirt. “Jemma?”

“Hmmm?” She’s kissing his neck now and he remembers that a sleepy Jemma is a handsy Jemma and as remarkably tempting as it is to kiss her back, a Jemma who didn’t get enough sleep because he kept her up all night is a terrifying thing.

“You. Bed. Now.”

“Okay,” she grumbles and lets him scoop her up and carry her to their bunk. She nestles against his shoulder like she’s always been meant to fit there and she’s warm and soft and perfect in his arms and in that moment, he feels like he’s never been luckier, just to have Jemma Simmons in his arms for this one minute. “Fitz?”

“Yes?”

“I love you,” she whispers happily, like it’s the simplest thing in the world. Like she’s said it a million times before and maybe she has. Maybe she’s been saying it along with every sandwich, every look, every “Oh Fitz”, every brush of her hand against his shoulder. And maybe he’s been saying it back before he even knew she was saying it.

“I know, Jemma,” he whispers back. “I love you too.”


	9. I Wouldn't Bet on It (Fitzsimmons and Tripskye)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> From a request for a variant on proposal fic ( _when_ Fitz decided to propose to Simmons) or anything Tripskye, which somehow evolved into both.

“Fitz had better take me along when he goes ring shopping,” Skye said smugly, watching Jemma tug Fitz out of the room as Fitz tried to balance a plate of English muffin pizzas, gaze at her adoringly, and kiss her all at the same time. They were so cute, it was kind of disgusting.

“Ring shopping? You might want to slow down,” Trip raised an eyebrow at her. “They just started dating–I’m pretty sure a glacier melted in the time it took them to get together. By the time he works up the courage to propose, we’ll all have jetpacks. Or at least some of those sweet Falcon wings. ”

“Did you see the way he looked at her just then?” Skye insisted. “The big eyes, “you are my entire world, let me adore you for ever and ever and make sweet, sweet science with you” look? Not the regular “let me adore you for ever” look–this was a proposal look.”

“You just want to win the Fitzsimmons betting pool after you lost to May last time.”

“She totally had inside info from Maria Hill. Or,” Skye paused dramatically and reached across Trip to snag another cookie. (And totally not to admire his fantastic biceps.) “I could just know everything. Definite possibility here.”

“Nah,” Trip said easily. “I bet that I know something you don’t.”

“What’s that?”

“Well…it just so happens that I’ve been wanting to kiss you for about five months ago, if you’d–” He didn’t get to finish his question because Skye kissed him, soft and sweet and long and not even bothering to hide the way that she sighed when he kissed her back. Because she’d been wanting to for quite a while too.

And because, of course, she totally knew everything. (And, five months later, when Fitz got down on one knee in the lab and proposed to Jemma, Skye didn’t even say “I told you so”, just leaned against Trip’s side and cooed until both halves of Fitzsimmons glared at her. And till May finally admitted defeat in the betting pool.)


	10. Sticking to the Script (Fitzsimmons)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Costars whose characters date each other on the show AU.

“I need you to kiss her with just a little more passion, Fitz,” the director boomed. “There she is, standing right in front of you, the love of your life, after having miraculously survived a car crash. Millions of viewers have been waiting for this moment.”

“I know,” Fitz sighed and wrapped his arms more tightly around Jem–Simmons, his very professional co-star and friend Simmons who he had never, ever, not even once had unprofessional thoughts. Not even that one time when they’d been stuck in a bed together filming the morning after scene for six hours and she’d made bad science puns the whole time. 

“You might want to slip a little tongue in there. Kiss her neck while you’re at it,” the director suggested. 

“I know,” he repeated and mouthed “sorry” at Simmons.

“Fitz, it’s really fine,” she whispered back and tugged on his tie a little more firmly. She’d used his tie to tug him to her when their characters first kissed and now, according to the show’s social media team, it had become a popular Tumblr text post. “Out of everyone who could have become my new love interest after the hotshot womanizing brain surgeon who truly loved me but couldn’t change his aforementioned womanizing ways proposed, left me at the altar, and took off for Switzerland, you were by far the best option. You always have snacks,” she teased. “Besides, I have a bit of a soft spot for Doctor Fitzy.”

“I can’t believe everyone calls him that,” he groaned. They were readjusting the lights again and Fitz probably could have stepped back from her until the director called action again. But really,he reasoned, that would just be inefficient. Much better to stay here, where he could keep on staring down into her big brown eyes, mouth only a few inches away from hers.

“I think it’s sweet. Five seasons, and he finally got the girl.”

“It hasn’t been five seasons,” he protested. For him, or for Dr. Fitzy. 

“Really? Dr. Fitzy pretty fell for Julia the minute he saw her–I heard you talking to the showrunners about it,” Simmons said smugly. “Despite the fact that she’d just nearly killed a patient by relying too much on her textbook knowledge and not on her natural instincts.”

“You listen in on everyone’s meetings with the showrunners. Kind of creepy, Simmons,” he muttered. 

“You love it,” she grinned happily up at him and when the director called action again, pulled him down by his tie to her without any warning and kissed him like she wouldn’t get to do it again fifteen times in the next hour. 

Yeah, he thought absently as he pulled her closer and shut his eyes against the brightness of the studio lights, pretending that it was real for just one minute more. Yeah, maybe he did.


	11. things you said at one am--Fitzsimmons

“Fitz, are you awake?” Jemma whispered. He didn’t reply, so she poked him. Fitz made a muffled noise that sounded like a mix between a groan, a mumble, and a “ohgodwhyme”.

“Now I am,” he said finally, after she’d refused to stop poking him. “But unless it’s Nobel worthy, I’m going back to sleep.”

“Fitz, in approximately seven minutes and fifteen seconds, a once-in-many-millenia comet will be passing over our heads. I am going to go watch it,” she informed him. “And because I love you, I woke you up so you could see it too.”

“I’ll catch it the next millenia,” he mumbled and pulled a pillow over his head. She tugged it away. 

“Fitz,” she sing-songed. “If you come and see the comet with me, I promise that afterward we can do exciting things. A particular kind of exciting thing.” Jemma tried to suggestively pout at him but she suspected that she just looked like she’d sucked on a particularly sour lemon. Luckily, Fitz had face planted into the mattress after she’d stolen the pillow. 

“Do exciting things involve sleep?”

“Nope,” she bounced up and down. “But they might involve my lab coat and high heels. And unparalleled opportunities for scientific observation. All kinds of scientific observation.” Fitz lifted his head up from the mattress.

Jemma (discreetly) pumped her fist in triumph.


	12. World's Worst Road Trip (Skyelance)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “our mutual friend dropped out of this trip at the last minute, so hi i guess we’re spending the next two weeks together”

“You know, I’m starting to think that all the scratches are actually holding this van together,” Lance says, staring at the (barely) moving death trap he’s apparently going to be spending the next two weeks in. He’s going to murder Fitz the next time he sees him. “No other explanation for how it’s survived this long.”

“Buffy is a classic,” Skye says indignantly and pats the van. “He didn’t mean it, I swear. I didn’t even know he was going to come,” she whispered. “Fitz and Jemma betrayed me.”

“You named the van Buffy? And Fitz and Jemma betrayed me too,” he adds, making a low grumbling noise under his breath. “There was going to be beer and barbecue. And the world’s largest ball of twine. Where are they, anyway?”

“In Las Vegas, counting cards and possibly getting married by an Elvis impersonator,” Skye shrugs. “Jemma sounded like she’d had one too many margaritas when she called me. Besides, the world’s largest ball of twine sounds kind of lame. What we’re going to see…” she pauses dramatically. “Is the world’s largest block of cheese.”


	13. things you said when you were drunk--Fitzsimmons

“I should set you up with one of my friends,” she said firmly, tipping her face back to look up at him. After an evening spent in the Boiler Room (and about three too many drinks), they’d snagged a bottle of wine and headed up to the roof terrace of their dorm, talking ( _arguing_ ) about science and Doctor Who and life. “We’re friends now, I know a lot of attractive people, and that’s the kind of thing that friends do for each other–set attractive people up with other attractive people so they can propagate their attractive genes.”

“You think I’m attractive?” Fitz barely kept himself from gaping at her, his brain stuck on the fact that Jemma Simmons, brilliant scientist and possibly the prettiest girl he’d ever met, thought that he was good-looking. He’d just stopped being amazed by the fact that they were even friends, after he’d spent the first two days of their partnership communicating by hand signals until he found the right thing to say to her, and he wasn’t entirely sure that he could deal with any further developments. 

“Of course you are. Low body fat percentage and all that,” Jemma gestured at him with her drink, nearly spilling frozen daiquiri all over her shirt. “So do you like girls? Boys? Both?”

“Biochemists,” he blurted out. 

“Are you trying to flirt with me?” Jemma asked curiously. She had the strangest feeling that she wouldn’t mind if he was. “That’s so cute.”

“Only if it’s working.” Fitz started intently at the ground, cheeks flushed bright red, and desperately hoped that they’d both have forgotten this by the morning.

“Well,” Jemma leaned over and kissed his cheek, right near the corner of his mouth. “Ask me again in a few minutes, and it might be."


	14. things you said after you kissed me--tripskye

“Damn girl.”

It’s what Trip says the first time that she kisses him, stretching up on the tips of her toes and hooking her hands in his shirt to tug him down to her and kiss him in the kind of way that promises she’ll do it again and again. And she does, before he even finishes saying the l in “girl”, grinning madly against his mouth and pulling him even closer, and all Trip can think is that he’s a goner and he wouldn’t have it any other way.

It’s what he says after they sleep together for the first time, her curled against his side as she shamelessly steals the blankets and leans over to sleepily kiss him goodnight. “Told you I was good,” Skye says smugly.

“Nah,” he shakes his head. “You’re perfect. You going to stick around in the morning?” He says it casually, but inside he’s holding his breath waiting for her answer because it’s all been easy and fun between them, kisses and jokes and a new lightness in her eyes that he knows is reflected in his own, but Trip knows that in this new world where everything seems to be changing, he wants her to stay. 

“Well, you did promise me pancakes.” she says and pulls him back down to her.

It’s what he says when she moves in with him, in their new apartment just off the base, and he sees her collection of Harry Potter books, big enough to take up a box all on their own. And at first he teases her about it, but then he remembers that Skye was once an orphan too and before he knows it, she’s challenging him to a trivia contest and he’s offering to take her to the Wizarding World of Harry Potter when they get their next vacation and they’ve completely forgotten about assembling their new couch.

And it’s what he says when he proposes, and she accepts, eyes wide and shining and a smile so big it stretches across her entire face. And it’s what he says when he slides the ring that his grandfather gave his grandmother onto her finger and it fits like it was made for her. Because maybe it was, maybe he’s been waiting for her all along, this girl who’s smart and funny and brave and tough and beautiful and lights up his life like a supernova, who teases him and always has his back and fits into his life like there’s been a space waiting for her all along. The girl that he’s pretty madly in love with and (because damn he’s lucky) the girl who loves him right back.


	15. things you said with no space between us--Fitzsimmons

Fitz tells her that he loves her when she can’t hear it, at first. When her lips are pressed to his, when they’re tangled together underneath her sheets, when they’re all gasps and moans and shared breath, when she’s asleep in his arms afterward, he whispers the words so quietly that it’s almost like he’s never said them.

Then, he gets bolder. He traces them across her skin when he holds her close, he kisses out the pattern of the words against their body, he brews it into her tea in the morning.

He tells her that she’s perfect, that she’s brilliant, that she’s beautiful, that she’s strong and kind all at once, and underneath everything else, he’s always saying it. Fitz thinks some days that he might burn up with the force of it, that the way he feels about her might consume him, and he thinks that he wouldn’t mind if it did. It’s in the way he looks at her, the way he touches her, the way he says her name when it’s only them.

But the words don’t slip out of his mouth until a bright May morning when they’re curled in bed together, her wrapped around him, and when they do, Jemma just smiles at him, a million-watt sun-bright smile that might be the best thing he’s ever seen, and says it back.


	16. things you said over the phone--Fitzsimmons

“I miss you.”

1\. Jemma whines it over the phone, their first vacation home from the Academy, perched on her bed and talking to him until three in the morning. It feels strange not having him beside her, like she’s misplaced something essential, and so she tells him everything that he’s not there to see until his flight lands at the Academy’s airfield and she runs right into his arms.

2\. Fitz says it when she’s away at a conference, pouty pixels as she carries her tablet around and talks to him over Skype in every spare minute. He gives her a pep talk before she gives her big presentation, she reads off the number of their favorite takeout place when he can’t be bothered to look it up, and when she gets back, he has a bouquet of flowers and a cake from the local bakery waiting for her. That night, she falls asleep curled up next to him and he holds her tight and promises to never let her go when he thinks she can’t hear it.

3\. She almost whispers it a million times when she’s undercover at Hydra, dialing his number over and over and never pressing the call button. Because she misses him with an ache so sharp that it nearly cuts through her skin, wants him with her that she forgets how impossible it is, wants him even when she knows that the man she wants is already gone.

4\. Fitz teases her with it when he’s off on a mission, promising to make it up to her as soon as he gets back to base, voice lower and deeper in a way that makes her squirm with longing, and when he returns, she kisses him until he sweeps her up and tries to prove that he missed her more.

“We miss you.”

5\. Their daughter’s waving at Jemma through the screen, ready for bed and dressed in her monkey pajamas, and Fitz has her on his lap and as Jemma blows goodnight kisses through the screen and beams at them both, she can’t wait to get home tomorrow. Because when she gets back, Peggy will show her exactly how many inches her bean plant has grown and demand that Jemma read the next chapter of Harry Potter to her and Fitz will try to cook dinner and maybe even succeed and hold her close late at night to make up for lost time. 

“I miss you too,” she tells them back. Because home is a pastel blue house with a garden out back, and a kitchen that’s half-filled with experiments, and her favorite chipped teacup from the Academy and, most of all, it is–it always has been– _him_.


	17. fitzsimmons + "I think I'm in love with you and I'm terrified"

“I think I’m in love with you and I’m terrified.” When Jemma first says it aloud (late at night, in her bunk, whispering the words to the wall and not to the boy she means them for), it sounds all too true. 

Because she is _in_ love with him–she knows the difference now–and it’s fast and fierce and eats up her days. Thoughts of him swim around her mind, plant a hook in her heart and refuse to let go, and she finds herself thinking about him (his hands, his eyes, his heart) even when she doesn’t mean to. She feels almost feverish, but she’s feeling better than ever, and when she shuts his eyes at night, it’s Fitz she sees stamped on the back of her eyelids.

She’s not sure how much of her heart is her own and how much belongs to him, how much of his heart she owns in return; not sure where she ends and he begins; not sure where this surrender will stop; not sure what would happen if she lost him again and Jemma Simmons has always been brave, but this _terrifies_ her.


	18. Wedding Night (Fitzsimmons + "If you keep on looking at me like that, we're not going to make it to a bed.")

If he kept on looking at her like that, they weren’t going to make it to a bed, Jemma thought. They’d have their wedding night right here in an elevator, probably scandalize the unfortunate person called to fix the mysteriously stopped elevator, and ruin her wedding dress for all eternity. They’d be talked about for days, Skye and Lance would never let them live it down, and one day, when they least expected it, May would probably crack a joke about it and embarrass them for days. She informed Fitz of all the possible consequences, as was her duty as a scientist, and he just grinned wickedly at her.

In fact, she was beginning to suspect that that, as Fitz kissed her deeply and lifted her up against the wall of the elevator, one hand hitting the emergency stop button while the other worked on the zipper to her dress, had been exactly his plan.


	19. Fitzsimmons + "no one needs to know"

“No one needs to know,” Fitz said defensively. “If you hadn’t come barging into my bunk, no one would have known.”

“You can’t have a puppy on the Playground, Fitz,” Jemma sighed. “It’ll chew through everything. Not to mention, it isn’t exactly conducive to secrecy.”

“Just look at his little face!” Fitz protested, scooping up the wriggly puppy in his arms and presenting him to Jemma. “And the little floppy ears and his big paws–he likes you, I can tell.” The puppy was leaning eagerly towards Jemma now and trying to lick her face, whining when it couldn’t quite reach, until Jemma finally gave in and scratched its ears. 

“He must take after you then.” 

“Low blow, Jemma Simmons. Low blow. But since you keep me around, does that mean you’ll keep Falcon here around too?”

“I suppose so,” Jemma sighed. Then, a minute later– “Really, Fitz? _Falcon_?”


	20. Massage Therapy (Fitzsimmons)

Jemma reached up to rub at her neck with an unhappy sigh–she’d been stooped over a lab bench nearly all day and every muscle in her body was aching all at once. Right now, all she wanted was her bed and a hot cup of tea and possibly an all-expenses-paid spa day, courtesy of SHIELD. Top scientists didn’t whimper, but the noise that came out of Jemma’s mouth as she straightened up was pretty close to one.

“Are you okay?” Fitz asked from behind her, tentatively wrapping an arm around her waist and dropping a kiss on her shoulder. They’d decided to be careful about PDA in the lab, especially in front of the junior scientists, but there was no one here now and he was so warm and smelled so nice and his arms fit so perfectly around her waist…

“I think I might have pulled something in my neck,” she said as she tipped her head back to lean against him and snuggled into his shoulder. “Bending over the bench all day.”

“Do you…well…I mean…I could give you a massage?” Fitz’s hands skimmed up her back, already smoothing out the cramps, and Jemma sighed happily in anticipation of everything his (very talented, gold medal material, really) hands could do.

“Which kind?”


	21. Fitzsimmons + "Tell me a secret"

_Tell me a secret._ Jemma whispers it to him, late at night in his bed,and because he can never say no to her, he does. 

When Fitz was five, he was awake to see his father walk out the door, hiding on the top landing on the stairs. And, seeing how his father didn’t even look back once, Fitz wondered if he’d been the reason why.

When Fitz was eleven, he pretended to be sick to miss his own graduation from college because he didn’t want to trip over the hems of his too-long robes and have everyone laugh at him. He didn’t have anyone to say goodbye to anyway.

When Fitz was sixteen, he almost didn’t go to the Academy, because the idea of leaving his mum by herself again was like a hole in the pit of his stomach. It wasn’t until she started packing his suitcase and told him she’d already accepted their offer that he let himself dream about it.

When Fitz was seventeen, he fell in love for the first and only time. It took him ten years to realize it.

When Fitz was twenty-seven, she fell in love with him too.

_That’s not a secret_ , Jemma tells him, laughing. _Not anymore._

_I know_ , he says. _That’s why I like that one best._


	22. Fitzsimmons + "I'm pregnant"

“I’m pregnant.” Jemma said casually, peering down at her latest Asgardian sample through the microscope. Across the lab bench, there was a giant crash. Oh dear. There went Fitz’s latest dispersal mechanism.

“You’re…pregnant?” Fitz gaped at her. “I…when…how? Jemma…” He was grinning hugely at her now, as the news sank in, eyes wide and bright.

“You should know how–you were there for it, after all.” Jemma tried very hard to keep from giggling as Fitz raced around the side of the lab bench and pressed both hands to her stomach. “You can’t feel much yet,” she informed him. “I’m only a few weeks in.” 

“It’s still amazing,” he breathed. “You’re amazing, Jemma. So…” he said, wrapping his arms around her and pressing a kiss to his cheek. “Does this mean we’ll have to flip a coin to decide if we’re naming them after a famous scientist or a superhero? Because, if it’s a boy, I think that Sam Wilson is definitely underappreciated among the–”

“Oh, _Fitz_.”


	23. Losing at Lasers (Fitzsimmons + "If you die, I'm going to kill you")

“If you die, I’m gonna kill you,” Fitz hissed. “You cannot leave me alone in laser tag, Jemma.” 

“I still don’t see why laser tag is part of the field training course. I’ve been thinking of writing a letter of complaint, actually,” Jemma added thoughtfully. “It’s not as if laser tag accurately mimics field conditions or, in fact–” That was when they both got hit by the team from Ops, draining all their points and knocking them both out of the game. “You know,” she said mournfully, after they’d left the laser tag course as fast as humanly possible. “We might end up getting an A-minus in this class. An A-minus”

“Want to drown our sorrows in pizza?”

“Only if there’s vegetables on it.”


	24. Tripskye + "I've seen the way you look at me when you think I don't notice"

“I’ve seen the way you look at me when you think I don’t notice,” Trip grins at her from across the picnic table. It’s a warm summer night, he’s a little drunk and a lot reckless, and Skye looks better against a sunset than anyone should.

“Doesn’t that mean you’ve been looking too?” She leans a little farther forward, close enough that he can count the colors hidden in her eyes, and Trip wonders hazily if he’s a little drunk on her too.

“Depends on whether or not you’d want me to.” If he didn’t know better, he’d think that she sounds unsure when she says it, blurting it out and laying her words out like an ill-considered offering. And then he remembers how the last guy that Skye liked turned out and he thinks that maybe she is. 

“Always,” he says and looks her straight in the eye as he says it, hoping that one word can hold the thousands he wants to say, the promises he wants to keep, the days and hours and weeks and months that he wants to fall in love with her in. 

She must get it, because she kisses him and in the press of her mouth to hers, he hears her say _always,/i > back._


	25. A Thief's Reward (Fitzsimmons + "I'm royalty and your family is trying to steal the crown")

“It must be Wednesday,” Jemma said. She was curled up on the throne, reading a book and sipping a mug of tea, and she would never have admitted it, but part of her had been counting the minutes until he showed up. “The crown’s not anywhere to be found here, per usual.”

“I never said that I was a good thief,” Fitz shrugged. “Just persistent.” He crossed over to peer at the cover of her book, stealing a sip of tea from her mug and making a face when he tasted Darjeeling. He could have sworn that she drank his least favorite tea every Wednesday, just to be contrary. “You’re reading Les Miserables in French again? Show-off.” Jemma just rolled her eyes fondly at him and let him perch on the arm of the throne.

“Tea should be here in about five minutes, and I got clotted cream this time,” Jemma informed him. “And raspberry jam. No wonder you never get any farther than here. I imagine that clotted cream and chocolate cupcakes rather trump laser grids and triple-locked vaults.”

“Who says that I’m still trying to steal the crown?” Fitz teased, leaning down to run his hand through her elaborate curls and tugging out each hair pin with a sigh of satisfaction. “Maybe I’ve found something even better.”

“Mmm…I wonder what that could ever–” Jemma didn’t get to finish her sentence because he kissed her then, lips warm and soft against hers. He buried his hand even more deeply in her hair to hold her close, his other hand idly playing with the bow at the top of her blouse, and deepened the kiss until Jemma sighed in satisfaction.

“I can’t believe you drank the bloody Darjeeling again,” he mumbled and set his mouth to her neck before she could come up with a suitable retort.

“I’ll get you to like it eventually,” she finally managed. “Want to know how?”

“Your highness, I think I always will.”


	26. Build-a-Boy (Fitzsimmons + Build-a-Bear Workshop AU)

“You’re staring at me,” the girl said, propping one hand on her hip and clutching a giant stuffed panda with the other.

“You’re at Build-a-Bear, and you’re at least twenty-five.” _And you might be the prettiest girl I’ve ever seen_ , Fitz added silently.

“So are you,” she retorted.

“I work here. In the seventh circle of hell,” he muttered under his breath. When Fitz had started looking for a part-time job to make up for all the unpaid lab work he’d done, he’d thought he could work in tech support, make coffee, deliver pizza, sell hammers and nails…anything but helping unsuspecting children make oversized stuffed animals with demonic eyes.

“I think they’re cute. Besides, it’s for my niece,” she said defensively. “Just because I can’t afford hand-carved wooden rocking horses or French alphabet blocks or three-hundred-dollar baby tutus–”

“They make three-hundred dollar baby tutus?” Fitz asked, horrified. That beat demonic-eyed stuffed animals any day.

“They do.” The girl grimaced and ran a hand through her hair. “I don’t suppose you’ve got any coffee hidden behind the counter.”

“One better,” Fitz said smugly. “I’ve got Irish coffee.”


	27. On the Slopes (Fitzsimmons + first time skiing and cute medic)

“This won’t hurt a bit,” Jemma said sweetly. She was lying through her teeth, as she applied more pressure on Leopold Fitz’s dislocated shoulder and tried to pop it back into place. Finally, she succeeded and Fitz made a noise high enough to shatter glass. “Please don’t do that. It makes people slightly nervous about calling for a medic if they hear the last patient screaming.”

“It hurts.” Fitz sulked.

“Well, if you hadn’t decided to attempt a black diamond run on your first day skiing, you wouldn’t be hurting at all now,” Jemma informed him. “But we’ll get some painkillers into you and you’ll be as happy as a clam. If a little loopy.”

“Do I get hot cocoa?” he asked, a cunning look coming over his face. “Maybe you could make some for me?”

“Fine,” Jemma sighed. “No complaints for the whole way down and I’ll even put marshmallows in.”


	28. Fitzsimmons + Hogwarts AU

“Fitz,” Jemma sighed. “Professor Lewis told us that there was only one g in _Engorgio_ at least three times.” She leaned down to inspect his cat, now the size of a small tiger and rather irked about it, and cooed to it. “We’ll get you back to your proper size in no time,” she promised. “Fitz was a little silly but it’ll all be fine.” Now the cat was bloody purring at her, not even trying to bat at Jemma’s blue and bronze tie. Fitz sighed: of course his cat liked Jemma better than him. But then, he liked Jemma better than anyone too.

“I, er…I was distracted,” he mumbled. _By you._ “You didn’t have to come all the way to Gryffindor Tower to fix it, you know–I would have figured it out eventually. Sharon and I were going to try out a bunch of different charms on it and see what worked.”

“Charging in without a plan? How very Gryffindor,” Jemma teased and quickly murmured a countercharm over his cat, accompanied by a few precise waves of her wand. The cat immediately shrank back down to its normal size, hissed at Fitz, and dived under the nearest couch. 

“You were the one who blew up our cauldron in Potions last week, because you thought adding salamander eggs would make a calming potion more potent,” Fitz replied. She’d looked strangely adorable covered in soot.

“But you let me.” Jemma propped her hands on her hips.

“Only because you promised me fudge if I let you experiment.” He had a horrible realization then. “Does fixing my cat mean that I owe you fudge then?”

“No, I think I’ll be nice this time–I’ll just take a butterbeer. Maybe two.” She smiled up at him and Fitz felt a strange swooping sensation in his stomach. “I’ve got to do rounds now, but the library? Later?” She stretched up to press a kiss to his cheek and then rushed for the door in a swirl of robes.

Fitz wasn’t sure, but he thought that she might have been blushing as she left.


	29. Fitzsimmons + James Bond AU

“It’s not what it looks like,” he says innocently. Far too innocently.

“My car does not need an ejector seat, Q,” Jemma replies. Technically, his name doesn’t even have a Q, but that’s what the head of the tech division is always called. There’s been many Q’s before him, just like there’s been many 007′s before her. However, there haven’t been many that were as good as they are. “It’s terribly retro, don’t you think?”

“It’s a classic!” Fitz protests. “I’ve got the knock-out lipstick ready as well, plus the knives in the boots. We’re going old-school for this one. But I’ve embedded a GPS tracker and communicator in your necklace, just in case.” He frowns slightly and as Jemma realizes that he’s _worried_ about her, she feels a massive surge of affection for Fitz sweep through her. They’ve been a team ever since they first met in MI6 training and she’s never considered what it must be like to be the one watching rather than the one doing.

“I’ll be careful, Fitz. Promise,” she says and gives him her real smile, sliding her hand over until it just covers the top of his.

“There’s avalanches in Switzerland, Jemma, and poison’s quite easy to hide in fondue and what if what’s-his-name isn’t as quite as easy to seduce as you thought?” he blurts out.

“Well,” Jemma murmurs as she steps closer to him. “I was actually thinking that maybe I could practice on you.”


	30. Fitzsimmons + "Please don't leave"

The first time that Leo Fitz talks to Jemma Simmons–really talks, for hours and hours, catching the ends of her sentences and offering up the beginnings of his, the only thing that he can think is _please don’t leave_.

Because she’s like no one he’s ever had the privilege to meet before, and he can’t bear the thought of not knowing everything he can about her. Because he’s greedy for more of her, every little bit that he can get, and the idea of not seeing that brilliant smile again sounds like pure torture. Because she’s a supernova and he has to catch every moment before she burns out.

So when the clock strikes seven, he asks her if she wants to order dinner, because they’re in the middle of brainstorming plans for a new kind of body armor that’ll probably change the world as they know it. And when she appears in his lab section the next day, he doesn’t even stutter when he asks her to be his partner. And when she falls asleep in his flat, he drapes a blanket over her and makes her tea in the morning. And when she goes on dates with other boys, he swallows all his yearning back down and wishes her luck, because he’d do whatever it takes to keep her.

Then she does leave and he breaks and puts himself back together again. When she comes back, he is angry but deep down he’s also grateful, so much that he chokes on the force of it and can’t say any of the things he means to.

When she leaves for the second time, the time that she didn’t mean to, he knows that he’d still do anything to keep her. So Leo Fitz is going into that rock and he’s not going to come back if it’s not with Jemma Simmons by his side.


	31. Dinner Date (Fitzsimmons)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Written for the lovely eclecticmuses' birthday a few months ago!

“That’s a lot of cookbooks you’ve got checked out there.” One of the Koenigs (Sam or Billy or god forbid, yet another one to confuse with his brothers) stood on the tips of his toes to glare over the stack of books at Fitz. “Are you planning to return them to the base library anytime soon?”

“I’ve still got two weeks left on them,” Fitz said without looking up.

“And what are you planning to do with them?” Koenig folded his arms across his chest and tried to look intimidating without toppling over.

“I’m cooking dinner for Jemma.” If he ever managed to find a recipe that didn’t call for five different kinds of spices—what was half a teaspoon of dried oregano supposed to do anyway? He’d investigated the situation in the Playground kitchen and it had been more than a little alarming: the only kind of seasoning he’d been able to find was a dusty, half-empty jar of allspice, tucked in the back of a cabinet, that had expired over a year ago. And he hadn’t even known that spices could expire. He would have suggested a classified expedition to the nearest supermarket, if not for the fact that he was pretty sure May would give him one of her inscrutable stares once he explained what it was for.

“Ahhh…candles, roses, white tablecloths…” Koenig wiggled one eyebrow at him.

“No,” Fitz said crossly. “I’m making her dinner because she’s too stressed out and because she deserves a break, but thanks to those fucking crystals, she can’t get one.” Koenig opened his mouth to make the inevitable rock joke, saw Fitz’s glare over the top of the cookbooks, and promptly fled.

Eventually, he talked Hunter into going grocery shopping off base with him, mostly by telling Hunter that Bobbi had told him it was a bad idea, and then smuggled five bags of groceries past the entire base while they were watching some movie with explosions in it. (The Playground’s entire DVD collection seemed to consist of movies featuring explosions and minimal dialogue.)

***

“Skye?” Fitz peered around the edge of a training room and carefully averted his eyes. Skye had been busy doing a series of training exercises with Lincoln and the odds were pretty good that he’d either be hit by something Skye was refining her powers on or be permanently scarred by the sight of Skye making out with Lincoln.

“Yeah?” she looked up from the gun she’d been carefully emptying of its ammo from twenty feet away.

“You remember how you told that you missed hacking?” he asked hopefully. “Want to find me a movie that doesn’t have any explosions and where the science makes sense?”

***

“Fitz, I’m not closing my eyes and letting you lead me down the hallway. I have a set of samples that the Director wants tested and a titration that’s almost done and someone managed to injure themselves again and I–” Jemma was pacing restlessly across the lab, one hand rubbing at the back of her neck as she listed off all the things she absolutely had to do right this minute and the thousand reasons she couldn’t stop and go with them. She looked paler than he’d ever seen and the dark circles under her eyes were notably more pronounced and as Fitz looked at her, he realized she probably hadn’t slept through the night since she came out of rock quarantine.

“Coulson doesn’t need the samples until the end of the week, you have a very capable minion to deal with the titration, and you’re not a medical doctor,” he said firmly and caught both her hands in his. “Jemma, take the night off for once. You’re allowed.”

“Am I really?” she sighed, looking up at him.

“Of course, you are. Come on!” He tugged her closer and leaned forward to kiss her quickly in a sudden flash of bravery, one hand curving around her face and the other tangled with hers at their side. They’d agreed against any public displays of affection in the lab, but as she leaned back into his kiss and sighed sweetly against his mouth, he thought that maybe he could talk her into making an occasional exception. “Jemma,” he whispered when she finally pulled back, a small smile curving at the corners of her mouth. “I made my mum’s peach pie.”

“The one with brown sugar and cinnamon?” He’d made the pie exactly ten times before, once for each year they’d been friends, and every time she’d practically begged him for the recipe.

“Yup. But you only get it if you take the whole night off,” he told her smugly.

“Not fair,” she protested.

“Yes, fair. I’m worried about you, Jem. You’re always working, you never sleep, I’m not even sure when you eat…just forget about everything you have to do for the night, okay? I made dinner and had Skye find a bunch of movies through illegal means and stole blankets from that storage room that Koenig thinks I don’t know about. I even had to bribe Hunter with two entire packs of beer to drive me,” he added, hoping to make her laugh. She giggled, just a little, and rested her head against his shoulder.

“You still can’t drive on the right side of the road, can you?” she murmured wickedly.

“You mean the wrong side of the road. Just tonight, okay?” He dropped a kiss on the top of her head. “Just give me tonight.”

“Will you be there the whole time?” she whispered against his shoulder. She was starting to relax against him now, her hands loosening their grip on his shirt, and as she stretched up to press a kiss to his cheek, Fitz thought that she looked like she’d finally stopped to take a breath.

“Of course, I will.” He’d be there for as long as she wanted him, Fitz thought hazily.

“Then I’ll give you every night.”


	32. All That Changes is Only Everything (Gunnar x Scarlett, Nashville)

When Scarlett wakes up, she stretches her hand across the sheets to reach for him and finds a note instead. He’s left it perched on a pillow, a message scrawled underneath two bars of music. _Come downstairs when you wake up._

She pads down the stairs to find him in the kitchen. He’s singing along to the radio, jeans hanging low on his hips and flour in his hair, and giving his waffle iron a suspicious look and Scarlett feels her heart swell impossibly bigger with the force of the way that she feels about him in that moment. Gunnar, standing in the sunlight, face open and glowing in a way that she hadn’t seen until last night, when he kissed her like he never wanted to stop.

She sings the next line of the song back to him and he spins around, surprised, only to laugh, and bend down to kiss her, lingering and long as he knots his hands in her hair and pulls her close. “You aren’t supposed to be awake yet,” he tells her. “I was making breakfast for you and everything.”

“Really?” she asks, hooking a finger through the loop of his jeans and smiling up at him. “I’d rather have woken up next to you.”

“That…can be arranged.” And with that, he scoops her up, kissing her again and ready to carry her back up the stairs to bed. They’re both laughing and she rests her cheek against his when she breaks their kiss, so close that their breath mingles when she whispers to him. She’s spent so long not touching him, so long telling herself to keep her hands at her sides, that she can’t stop touching him now that he’s hers again. Now that she’s let herself want him—want _this_ – again. Because really, she never stopped, did she?

“Though I wouldn’t mind the waffles too,” she adds. “We have time.”

“We do?” It’s a real question. He’s looking at her, eyes wide and hopeful, and he’s waiting for her to tell him that it’s real this time, that they’re not going to back away, that they get to follow through on the promise they made the very first time they sang together. That this is the _it_ they’ve always been.

“All the time in the world,” Scarlett whispers. “All the time in forever.”


	33. Monopolize Me (Dan x Blair, Gossip Girl)

“I think I’ll put another hotel on Park Place,” Blair says casually. She’s been absolutely trouncing the entire Humphrey family at Monopoly for the past two hours (his dad and Lily already went out for dinner after their swift and inevitable defeat) and she’s trying very hard not to look pleased about it, despite the little smirk tugging at the corner of her mouth. Dan thinks it’s kind of adorable.

“You’re ruthless, Waldorf,” he groans and reluctantly moves his piece another two spaces, onto yet another of her properties. “And you’ve officially bankrupted the last of the Humphreys.” She does a little shimmy from her spot cross-legged on the floor and leans across to take the last of his Monopoly money. He really shouldn’t find this attractive.

“Life on the Upper East Side is a lot like Monopoly,” she says smugly. “Except the money only comes in shades of green. And no one ever gets to walk away from the table.” Blair glances down and away from him, one hand nervously tugging at the cuff of her shirt.

“I think you could if you wanted to.” He scoots a few inches closer to her and lets her tip her head against his shoulder. “If you can defeat the former master of Humphrey Family Monopoly, I’m pretty sure that you can do anything.” She laughs a little and moves closer until their legs are overlapping and she’s near enough to inspect his flannel shirt with her usual look of disdain and Dan relaxes a little. (If she can glare at his shirts, she’s going to be okay.) He kisses the top of her head and for a few minutes they just sit there in silence, close enough that he can hear the steady, reassuring thump of her heart. “I think my dad and Lily are going back to Manhattan for the night,” he says eventually. “Want to order takeout and watch _Roman Holiday_?”

“Yes,” she replies and climbs into his lap, already tugging at the first button of his shirt. “But before that, I want you to kiss me.”

Monopoly pieces go flying _everywhere_.


	34. Take Two (Tripskye + Celebrity fake dating)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Written for lavendergaia as a welcome-back to Tumblr present.

Someone is sitting in her favorite paparazzi-avoiding spot. _Damn it._ Skye sighs, still standing at the top of the stairs, and sends her best death glare to the back of the spot-stealer’s head. She used to love going out, dancing all night with Jemma and Bobbi and daring each other to order the drinks with the most embarrassing names, but that had been before her album went platinum and her TV show got a full-season order. Now, if she goes out, she goes to places where she can use her name to make sure she’s seated someplace where no one else can see her. The VIP upper level of this club has always been one of her favorites: she can see everything but no one can ask her for autographs, try to take a selfie with her, or ask her who she’s dating.

“You took my spot,” she says, louder than she means to, and the spot-stealer turns around and— _Damn_. She wonders if all of those muscles are real. They couldn’t be, could they? (God, she really hopes they are.) “But,” she adds, straightening up a little to put her sequined dress, and everything it shows off, on display and smiling like her sky-high heels don’t hurt at all. “I might be willing to share.”

“Come on up. My nieces would never forgive me if they found out that I’d stolen their favorite singer’s spot.” He shot her a dazzling smile and Skye suddenly realized who he was: Antoine Triplett, the Golden-Glove winning shortstop for the Angels and probably the one athlete that everyone in LA knew. “Are you going by Skye or Daisy now?”

“Skye to my friends, Daisy to my enemies. Including the man with the telephoto lens who’s currently lurking on the dance floor hooking to get a photo of me with my latest “boy toy.” Skye says, grimacing.

“I feel that. The reporters won’t stop asking me if there’s a lucky lady in my life.” Trip winces and takes a huge sip of his drink. “So can I buy you a drink as an apology?”

“Better than that.” She drapes herself across one of the giant plush chairs and smolders up at him as best she can. He smolders right back. “I’ll buy you one right back.”

She’s pretty drunk when she decides that fake-dating Antoine Triplett to get the paparazzi off her back is a good idea. Because he’s watched The Little Mermaid about fifty times for the sake of his nieces and can recite all the lyrics to “Under the Sea” while seriously drunk, because he steps right in front of her when a photographer tries to get up to their booth, because he laughs at her dumb puns, because he looks at French fries like they’re kryptonite and someone needs to convince him to loosen up once in a while, and, okay, maybe because she really wants to see him on the red carpet with her, in full suit and tie.

Three months later, Skye figures out that she was wrong. Dating him for real is a much better idea.


	35. Do the Twist (Tripskye + game night, background Fitzsimmons)

“Girl, you can’t keep on using your powers to win at Twister. Got to give the rest of us a chance sometimes.” Trip says from his spot on the floor, where he’s sprawled out after Skye sent them all tumbling down and was declared the Playground Twister champion. For the twenty-fifth time in a row.

“Fitz was trying to rig the spinner to point to the colors nearest him!” Skye protests, ignoring a muffled “Hey!” from Fitz from where he’s tangled up with Simmons in the corner. Both of them are blushing but neither of them are moving away. “Really, he should be thanking me.”

“Matchmaker,” Trip mouths at her with a fond smile. “You think you’re pretty brilliant, don’t you?”

“Well, that’s because I am.” Skye says and leans across the Twister mat to kiss him, giggling when he tries to sit up to kiss her properly and their noses bump. Trip just shrugs it off and wraps an arm around her waist to kiss her again.

“Right. We’ll see who the Twister champion is next time. Might have to bring some of my Ops training into play. You know,” he tells her, completely straight-faced. “We actually have a game night unit second year at the Academy. Learned how to take down a whole squad with Monopoly money.”

“Liar,” Skye accuses playfully.

“Only one way to find out.” Trip grabs the spinner and holds it up. From the corner, Fitz groans something that sounds suspiciously like “Not again”.

“Bring it on.”


	36. The Sword in the Stone (Tripskye + medieval)

None of it would ever have happened if Skye hadn’t needed a sword. But need a sword she did, after she’d snapped her first one in half fighting a giant in Sherwood Forest. It’d been made of cheap iron anyway, by a blacksmith who’d mistaken her for a noble lady who’d heard one too many tales of valiant knights and perilous quests. Skye had asked him if he’d ever met a noble lady who had time to hear valiant tales, let alone hear too many, because she hadn’t. She’d had to leave that village before her sword had even finished cooling.

So she’d gone looking for one and she’d found it. The fact that it had been in a stone hadn’t seemed to matter at the time. She’d pulled it out and it had slid into her hand as easy as butter, its weight settling into her palm like it’d been meant to rest there. Then the sorceress had appeared and things had gotten significantly more complicated.

The sorceress’ name was Jemma and underneath her sweet face and repeated offers of hot drinks, Skye suspected that she was very, very good at what she did and more than a little dangerous. Jemma had been waiting for someone to pull the sword out of the stone for over twenty years and according to her, now that Skye had, everything was solved. Skye was the rightfully born queen of all England and things would finally get sorted out.

As it turned out, Jemma had been half right. Skye was the rightfully born queen, but everything was very far from getting sorted out. Right now, she was holding court in a muddy tent between battles and trying to hold court over a motley array of knights at a round table. Because as it turned out, not many of the men who’d been dividing England up between themselves liked the idea of the one rightful queen. No matter: she was going to make them.

She was listening to a hedge magician Jemma had found somewhere present a plan for subtly blowing up fortifications and wondering if the rain would ever stop when he appeared. The flaps of the tent parted and for a moment, the clouds parted too to let one solitary ray of sunshine beam down on the man standing there. “My lady,” he said. “I’ve come to pledge you my sword if you’ll have it.”

“And whose sword am I being offered?” she asked, mouth suddenly dry. No one should look that handsome in the mud—she’d decree it once she finally got her crown. All people covered in mud would look exactly like they were covered in mud, not like they’d stepped off the pages of one of the storybooks she’d read to herself at night.

“Sir Antoine Triplett. And all the swords of my house as well,” he added. “We served Good Queen Margaret many years ago, before England fell apart, and we are ready to serve another queen.”

“I made my claim the moment that I pulled the sword from the stone. Why have you not come before?” Skye lifted her chin high and tried to look regal in her wooden camp chair.

“My father died before I came of age and my guardian, Sir Garrett, was not…well disposed towards your claim. But he no longer wields any power within my walls and I came to you as soon as I could, my lady. It was a long and difficult journey to the North and I beg your forgiveness for being so tardy.” He sank down to one knee and extended his sword towards her, balanced on both his palms. By Skye’s side, Jemma muttered something that sounded like “so romantic”. Skye rose from her chair and walked towards him. She didn’t look much like a queen, her hair hacked short and her breeches and boots permanently streaked with mud, but she walked like she knew everyone’s eyes were on her and held her head as high as if there were already a crown on it. 

“Why do you want to serve me, Sir Triplett?” she asked. As she approached him, out of the corner of her eye she saw Lady May, one of her oldest and most trusted advisers, incline her head towards him ever so slightly. So she approved, after all.

“Because you are the true queen, my lady. And because I know that you will be a good one,” he said with his eyes fixed on hers. The sword was unsheathed and she could see where its blade was biting into his palms, but he kept his eyes on hers for the entire time and Skye knew that she didn’t need any of Jemma’s spells to see what was in them. She’d wished for a champion, not her champion but the realm’s (she’d already served as her own champion well enough) and she’d gotten him. Kneeling here before her in the mud and looking like he was the sun all the same.

So Skye took the sword from his hands and let the blade bite into her palms too, so their blood was intermingled, and touched it to both of his shoulders and bade him rise. Not as a knight, not as a lord, though he was both of those things, but as the land’s champion. As the champion for those who lacked one. And as he rose to meet her, hands brushing against hers as she gave him his sword back again, the once and future queen thought that just maybe, the sword had chosen well in choosing her, in knowing that she would choose him and, most of all, in choosing _them_.


	37. Fitzsimmons + Pride and Prejudice AU

The first time they met, they were determined to dislike each other within two minutes of first acquaintance and so they did. Jemma found Mr. Fitz proud, haughty, and judging from his silence and clumsy dancing, utterly lacking in all social graces. She supposed there were some things even ten thousand pounds a year couldn’t buy. Fitz found Miss Jemma Simmons altogether too lively for polite society and completely too pretty for him to remain composed in her presence.

So when Trip proposed that he dance with her, due to the lack of gentlemen in the room, he refused. Loudly. “The very idea of it is ridiculous,” he scoffed. “A girl like her and a man like me…it would be sheer catastrophe.”

Jemma did a very fine impression of him saying it for the next three weeks to all her friends and family and pretended that her pride wasn’t nearly as hurt as it was. She would have been perfectly happy to never see Leopold Fitz, estate and fine friends and fortune and all, again in her life but, as ill luck would have it, his best friend was completely enraptured with her sister. So they were thrust together again and again in every kind of social engagement, and Jemma tried her very best to be as impolitely polite as she could. She slipped carefully worded barbs his way whenever they were forced to make conversation, refused his every offer of a dance with the same excuse, and, when a handsome young military officer came to town, she believed every scathing word that Mr. Ward told her.

And so of course, Fitz had to fall in love with her.


	38. I'll Have What She's Having (Fitzsimmons + When Harry Met Sally AU)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This particular drabble is more T than G, since it's inspired by the deli scene in the movie...

“Scientifically speaking, the odds of it happening to you are very high,” Jemma says smugly and spears a pickle with her fork, presumably to demonstrate something scientifically. Fitz can already feel the dread swelling in his stomach. “I’m telling you, every woman does it.”

“Well, not with me,” Fitz sputters. He’s turning a very bright shade of pink and this is not the kind of conversation he wants to have in a deli. 

Or ever, really. Especially with Jemma, who’s been his best friend ever since they drove halfway across the country in a falling apart car, debating all the way, and who he has never ever thought of in that way. Not ever. 

Because that would be weird and his and Jemma’s friendship is not weird, no matter what his friend Skye and her friend Trip say, and therefore they should not be having this conversation about how often women fake it. Especially over lunch at his favorite place. “I know things, all right, and I know when a woman’s having a,” he lowers his voice, so he won’t scandalize the group of little old ladies two tables over. “A good orgasm.”

“Do you really?” Jemma smirks at him like she knows something he doesn’t. Which, to be fair, happens quite often. There’s a flush high on her cheeks and a sparkle in her eyes that suggests she’s about to whip out one of her lectures on female sexuality, complete with carefully researched statistics.

“Yes, I do,” he says indignantly. “I have very, um, very satisfied customers. We can tell, you know. It’s not exactly subtle—there’s, ah, things. That you can feel. And hear. And all of that.” Fitz stuffs half his sandwich into his mouth so he can’t say anything else and feels himself flush deep red all the way down to his toes.

“Hearing, you say?” Jemma quirks an eyebrow at him and then she lets out a breathy little moan. Then another. Fitz fidgets in his seat.

“Jemma,” he hisses around a mouthful of sandwich. “Jemma, what are you doing?”

“Proving a point,” she whispers and moans a little louder. It’s very convincing and Fitz is rapidly becoming very, very uncomfortable. She’s adding in gasps now too, little noises that sound peculiarly Jemma even though he’s never heard them before, and she’s moaning louder and louder and people are turning to stare and forget his tenth grade production of Romeo and Juliet, this is the most awkwardly arousing moment of his life.

Fitz stares intently down at his french fries like they’re the most fascinating thing on the planet and, as she starts throwing a few choice phrases in there, decides that he’s never going to argue with Jemma about anything even remotely relating to sex ever again. By the time she finishes, the entire restaurant is staring at them and Fitz wonders if they’ll ever be able to come back here again. (And in the back of his mind, a very small, very bad part of him wonders if she’s loud when she’s not faking it too.)

As they pay the check and stand to go, one of the elderly ladies from two tables over comes over and traps them just before Fitz is out of the booth. “We were wondering, dear,” she asks Jemma. “What exactly you had this morning?”

“French toast stuffed with caramelized bananas and walnuts,” Jemma says sweetly and then turns to Fitz, smiling wickedly up at him. “And him, of course.”


	39. Winning Christmas (Fitzsimmons family dynamics)

This year, the Fitzsimmons family was going to win Christmas. And if Fitz had to electrocute himself in the process, it would be well worth it, if only to wipe the smirk off the faces of their neighbors down the street. Last year,Fitz and Jemma had constructed an entire nativity scene with period-accurate plants and landscape, only to be defeated by a light-up Santa and sleigh, complete with reindeer.

“I don’t think we need any more lights,” Jemma said dryly from down in the backyard, cup of tea in one hand and first-aid kit in the other.

“We’ve only got eight, Jemma. Last year they had twelve.”

“Eight is elegant. Twelve is tacky. And involves you being electrocuted.” Fitz couldn’t see her from where he was stretched out across the roof but he was pretty sure she was frowning. “I happen to like my husband out of danger, thank you very much,” Jemma added primly.

“’M an engineer. I know what I’m doing,” he mumbled around a mouthful of small tools.

“Sophie made a special cookie that looks like you. She said that she was saving it for Daddy to eat in the hospital after he finished with the lights.”

 _God damn it._ Fitz plugged in the last strand of lights and started to shimmy down the ladder. “Sophie is prone to exaggeration and less cunning than she thinks she is. Just like her mother. And,” he said quickly before Jemma’s frown could become a full-on pout. “She’s absolutely perfect. Just like her mother.”


	40. Having to share a bed + Fitzsimmons

“Don’t think that you’re getting all the pillows this time,” he warned her. “All I got was one sheet and half a blanket the last time we had to share a room at a conference.” He didn’t mention, of course, that they very probably could have gotten separate rooms. Or roommates who weren’t each other. But he’d much rather be with Jemma than with any other strange scientist and he’d end up spending all his time in her hotel room, anyway, preparing for their presentation.

“I have a very sensitive neck,” Jemma informed him from where she was attacking the bathroom counters with a swab and a petri dish. (“Some fascinating bacteria are bound to pop up in places like these, Fitz.”) “It requires all the pillows possible. But maybe it wouldn’t if you didn’t complain about not having any pillows,” she added with a sweet smile.

“I don’t complain,” he said stubbornly. “I voice my objections in a reasonable, adult manner.”

“So pillow fights are reasonable and adult now?” Fitz should have known better than to provoke her, because before he said anything else a pillow came flying at him. He threw one right back and before long every available surface was covered with pillows, from the giant bolster at the back of the bed to the tiny throw pillows that had been perched on top of the covers. Fitz took shelter behind the sofa, Jemma bombarded him mercilessly, and in the midst of all the chaos, both of them very deliberately avoided talking about what had happened the last time they shared a bed.

At that conference a few months ago, he’d had woken up with her head on his chest and one of her legs slung in between his and when she’d pressed her lips to the curve of his collarbone and let her hand rest at the very edge of his pajama pants, fingers skimming over his hip bone, he’d pretended to still be asleep and stayed very still. Very, very still. Jemma did odd things in the mornings before she’d had her caffeine, after all, and if he could just stop dreaming about it, it wouldn’t be a problem. Not at all.


	41. Arrangements (Fitzsimmons + romance after marriage)

Jemma Simmons falls in love with Leo Fitz precisely because no one expects her to. She is wooed, won, and wed without exchanging more than ten words with him but her family has an ancient title and a pile of almost as ancient debts, and he has more money than he knows what to do with. Marriages have been made for less. 

But his blue eyes are kind and he smiles like a little boy presented with a biscuit when he sees the library at her family’s manor for the first time and he is giving her sisters dowries that are more generous than they should be, and so Jemma tells herself that marriages have also been built on far worse and resolves to like him as best she can. It is far less difficult than she expected it to be.

Fitz’s house is so grand that it seems to puzzle him sometimes, as he keeps on asking her what exactly he’s supposed to use all these rooms for, and yet she keeps on running into him. In the library, where he fetches books from the highest shelves for her with an ingenious little device he calls a drone. In the portrait gallery, where he makes up amusing stories about the imaginary ancestors whose pictures hang there. In the drawing room, where there are always her favorite cakes on the tea tray around four o'clock. In the gardens, where he shows her the roses that his gardener breeds and offers to let her name the next one. In the ballroom where, when they host their much-dreaded first ball, he links his hand through hers and refuses to dance with anyone else. 

It takes Jemma a while to realize that he’s wooing her, with everything he’s picked up from the novels he thinks she doesn’t know he has hidden away in his desk and the whispered conversations with her sisters she pretends not to hear. It takes her even longer to realize that she likes it. And finally, it takes her nearly a year to the day after she promised to have and hold him for the rest of her life to go right to him and hold him, pressing her lips to hers soft as a whisper and hard as a promise.

It only takes him a second to kiss her back.


	42. Fitzsimmons + Falling Asleep in Various Vehicles

They were flying back to the UK together when it happened for the first time. They’d just become friends, after a remarkably awkward stretch of three days being lab partners and not speaking to each other, and Fitz had been surprised when she’d asked him if he wanted to fly back together. He was even more surprised when she fell asleep on his shoulder thirty minutes into the flight.

Jemma didn’t even stay awake long enough for them to turn off the fasten seat belt sign, pushing up the arm rest and slotting her head into the curve of his shoulder like it had been made for her. By the time Fitz figured out what he wanted to say about it, she was so soundly asleep that he couldn’t wake her up. She wasn’t too heavy anyway and his flannel shirt was kind of like a blanket and she smelled nice…and if he moved her, he would probably face her wrath later.

The second time was on the plane back and by then, he didn’t even bother thinking what to do. He’d simply accepted his fate as Jemma Simmons’ pillow. On planes, on trains, on buses, in the backseat of cars on long rides with their friends, sometimes even slumped on the couch in their lab.

She fell asleep on his shoulder in the car from the train station when she came up to Glasgow to visit him for Christmas one year, and his entire family teased him about it mercilessly for the rest of the vacation. No matter how many times he insisted that they were definitely, totally, absolutely not together, his male cousins waggled their eyebrows suggestively at him and his female cousins peppered him with advice about what to do on the anniversary of their first date. When he asked her, a little grumpily, why she did it, she just shrugged, smiled up at him, and said that he had a nice shoulder.

It wasn’t as simple as that, of course. When she dropped her head onto his shoulder and smiled up at him, he read all other kinds of things in her eyes, things that looked strangely like home. He didn’t have to say that she was his home too, just wrapped an arm around her waist and held her fast as she shut her eyes and slipped off into dreams.


	43. Karedevil + Victorian

Matt Murdock thought sometimes that, in the foggy streets of London, everyone was blind. Some of them were simply not accustomed to it. And, wandering through the streets of London one foggy night with his eyes shut and the rest of his senses wide open, walking stick tapping against the cobblestones, he wondered who was lurking in the shadows and planning to take advantage of the city’s blindness.

Any hour of the day or night, there was a crime being committed somewhere in London and all he had to do was find it. Matt halted by a lamp post, took a breath, and listened, filtering through layers and layers of sound until he found the one closest to him and…there! A scream, nearly muffled by the sound of a glove. The scrape of boots on the stone, of someone being dragged. The snick of a knife. Matt pulled the sword out of his cane and ran.

By the time the man in the mask found them, Karen already had a knife wound in her side. The man who’d gone after her had three. She’d had the evening off from her work as a governess and had been walking to take supper at a friend’s house when he’d grabbed her, holding a knife to her throat and hissing bloody threats into her ear as he dragged her into the alley. Maybe he was mad, maybe he was just bloody-minded, maybe he was the murderer of Whitechapel that they’d been whispering about but whatever he was, Karen was not going to be his next victim. She had another knife in her boot and she’d been about to draw it out when the man in the mask dropped down from a rooftop, threw her attacker against a brick wall, and beat him bloody until he fell to the ground, unconscious.

“How did you do that?” she whispered when he turned to face her. “Beat him like that? Find me? I tried to scream, but he put a hand over my mouth and told me that no one would come to rescue me.”

“So you decided to rescue yourself?”

“Yes, I did,” Karen replied and lifted her chin higher.

“You’re very brave, Miss…”

“Page. Karen Page.” She would offer him her hand but her gloves are torn to bits and stained with blood. “And you are?”

“I’m the man in the mask. I’ll have to go soon—Scotland Yard don’t like me much,” he explained.

“Scotland Yard? For this?” Detectives didn’t bother themselves with the murders of unknown girls in London, not unless someone paid them to do it. “Men who try to murder women are a farthing a dozen in London.”

“Not this one. I think, Miss Page, you may have just caught the Ripper.” And with that, he was gone, leaving Karen with a murderer at her feet, the proof of it in her bruises and the wound at her side, the sound of the police’s footsteps pounding around the corner, and the certainty that she was going to find him again.


	44. Through Glass (Fitzsimmons + Fitz breaking quarantine)

He sits on the other side of the glass from her and slips messages through the slot in the wall. They aren’t much. Silly jokes with science-themed puns, updates on what he’s working on in the lab, comments on the latest episode of _Doctor Who_ , which they’ve been watching simultaneously from either side of the quarantine wall. Some days, he presses his hand up against the glass and waits until she presses hers right back, their fingers matching up with each other perfectly.

He wants to see her without a barrier between them, wrap his arms around her and make sure nothing bad happens to her ever again, hold her as tight or as loosely as she wants. He wants to kiss her so badly that he aches with it, craves the warmth of her skin brushing against his, but honestly he’d just be happy to be beside her, to feel her presence in the same room. To have her there again after so many months of her being gone. And from the way she looks at him from inside her room, eyes wide and hopeful, leaping to her feet whenever he comes into sight, he thinks that she wants it too.

On day eight of Jemma’s quarantine, he snaps. He marches into Bobbi’s lab and asks her if all of Jemma’s tests have come up clean and when she says yes, he goes right back to Jemma’s quarantine cell, opens the door, and ignores all the alarms that go off. He wraps his arms around her tight, one hand curved at her waist and the other rubbing circles on her back, and she fits against him perfectly, her head tucked underneath his chin so he can kiss her hair and whisper things to her.

He tells her how glad he is that she’s back, how much he wants her to be okay, how much he missed her. He tells her that he loves her over and over, that he loves her enough to stretch to the farthest star there is in the sky and back again, that he loves her enough to fill up galaxies and burn new suns into existence. And he only stops telling her because she kisses him like she’s burning up with the need for it, like she’s been drowning and starving and gasping for air for eight days.

He kisses her back like he’s been burning too.


	45. Serpents and Statues (Fitzsimmons + Indiana Jones AU)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> These are two snippets in the same Indiana Jones AU, as inspired by a few Season 3 promo pics where Fitz got his archaeologist on...

“You know, the artifact would be much better off in a museum,” Fitz told her. “We have state-of-the-art conservation facilities. You have a dusty bar.”

“And you have that ridiculous fedora that you carry things around in,” Jemma retorted. “Completely unprofessional. The staff is much better off with me. I’ve already defended it from thieves three times–do you even know how to land a punch?”

“I have a whip,” he sputtered. When the university had given him this assignment, they’d framed it as an easy one. Offer Jemma Simmons a substantial sum for the priceless Egyptian artifact she’d somehow acquired, hand over said substantial sum, and head back in artifact with tow. Instead he’d met the most stubborn woman (with the prettiest smile) to ever grace the face of the earth.

“The whip didn’t do much good against Severus,” she said smugly. “All he wanted was to snuggle with you.”

“What kind of person keeps a pet snake anyway?” Fitz huffed. Her kind, evidently.

 

***

“I thought you were an archaeologist,” Jemma said from her perch on the hood of the car, china teacup held in one hand and that infernal pet snake coiled up on her lap, basking in the sun. If Fitz didn’t know better, he would have sworn that the thing was grinning at him as he sifted through endless shards of dinosaur bones.

“One of my colleagues at the university asked for help in excavating some dinosaur bones they’d turned up out here. Too big for them to handle, so they called me in,” Fitz said smugly. 

“Do you ever actually teach classes, Mr. Fitz, or do you just gallivant around trying to steal statues from innocent biologists?”

“Not the bloody statue again,” Fitz muttered. “Let’s just ignore the fact that a group of crazed neo-Nazis armed with alarmingly large guns was also after the statue and that if it hadn’t been for me, you’d still be tied up in that Tibetan temple.”

“I was perfectly capable of untying myself!” Jemma protested. “And I wasn’t the one who nearly ate poisonous fruit and tried to adopt a monkey in Peru.”

“He would have made the perfect assistant,” Fitz grumbled, brushing more dirt off the bones. Better than Jemma, anyway, with her full tea service that she insisted on carrying around with her everywhere and her tendency to enumerate all the ways in which he was wrong on a regular basis, with a smug smile that he wanted to kiss right off her face. (Which he should really stop doing, because her smile only got smugger after he kissed her.) Fitz whisked a little more dirt away, glanced down, and froze. “Jemma? I need you to come over and look at this right away.”

“Neither of my phDs were in dinosaurs.” Jemma sighed but she slid off the hood of the car anyway and walked over to him, teacup still clutched in one hand.

“But these bones aren’t dinosaur. They’re dragon.”


	46. Underneath the Mask (Karedevil + Karen finding out Matt's secret identity)

Karen finds the mask the morning after, when she’s hunting through his kitchen cabinets for coffee, still half-asleep. Her hand hits leather at the back of a cupboard and she tugs, hard, and an all-too-familiar mask comes spilling out.

For a moment, Karen just stands there and stares. Then the pieces start clicking together in her head, one after another: the bruises, the late-night phone calls that have no answer, the way the man in the mask arrived in her apartment just in time. The things that he does, whether he’s Matt or the mask, his stubborn determination to make the city better. And for a moment, she wonders why it took her this long to figure it out.

“Karen?” Matt says from the doorway. His hair is rumpled and his eyes soft and open in a way that she’s never seen before and as he smiles at her and holds out a hand, she feels a sharp, sudden tug on her heart. “I was wondering if you could, ah…there’s something I want to tell you. I should have told you last night but…” But last night had been all breath and hands and getting as close to him as she possibly could, his mouth on hers and her legs around his waist and their hearts beating fast against each other. Words hadn’t had any part of it.

But he’s offering her words now, offering her the truth that maybe he’s been trying to tell her all along.( Because Matt Murdock would be a hero even without the mask, she thinks.) So Karen smiles and puts the mask down and goes to listen. Goes to him.


	47. Perfect Plan (Dair + Blair falls first)

Blair doesn’t know how to woo him. If it were anyone else, she’d just pluck him right from the crowd and link her hand in his, and he’d be so dumbstruck that he’d let her do it. She’d pull her hair back with a headband and zip herself into the right outfit and present herself like the perfectly wrapped present anyone would be happy to receive. (Maybe with a little dash of blackmail on the side.)

But this is Dan. Dan who never remembers to tuck in his shirts or brush his hair, Dan who walks around reading a thick paperback book and tries to look ironic doing it, Dan who hates everything that she stands for. Dan who she’s supposed to hate right back. 

The fact that she wants to press him up against the nearest wall and kiss him is highly inconvenient. But–but--if she actually spends any sizable amount of time with him, it’ll go away. It has to. Ir’s Humphrey, after all–how long can they really get along for?

So she marches up to him and starts reasoned arguments about his latest tome until to their mutual surprise, they find something that they agree on. She watches movies with him over the phone late at night, she wanders through museums with him and points out all her favorite (and least favorite) paintings, and she ventures all the way out to Brooklyn to have coffee and argue with him some more. And her plan appears to have backfired, because the more time she spends with him, the closer she wants to get.

So clearly she has to kiss him. It’s the only way she’ll get him out of her head.

She just didn’t account for what would happen if he kissed her back.


	48. Secret Agent Man (Fitzsimmons + mysterious neighbor AU)

Something very suspicious was going on in Apartment 3B. Strange bangs and shouts could be heard from behind its unremarkable door at all hours of the day and night, occasional puffs of colored smoke emanated out its windows, and strange (if not entirely unpleasant) smells drifted up the stairs on a semi-regular basis. When Jemma had inquired with the landlord about it, he’d just given her a blank stare and told her that he’d never had any other complaints about Mr. Fitz. 

So clearly, Jemma was going to have to investigate herself. Even if it meant breaking into his apartment at three in the afternoon, in broad daylight, where anyone could see her using the very unreliable lock pick she’d made herself. Jemma poked at the lock one more time and sighed heavily. Either her lock picking skills were sadly below par or some of the strange bangs she’d heard had gone towards creating an elaborate lock. 

“Excuse me,” someone said from behind her. “Are you trying to break into my apartment?”

“No! I, ah…I thought that this was my apartment. They look very similar,” Jemma said defensively and turned to face her accuser. He was annoyingly handsome for someone so disruptive, with sandy hair, bright blue eyes, and stubble that, instead of implying he lacked the wherewithal to shave, simply made his jawline more defined. People who disturbed her sleep shouldn’t be handsome–it sent all kinds of mixed messages. 

“So you were trying to break into your own apartment?” he asked.

“Don’t you?” Jemma propped both hands on her hips and stared up at him. “It’s important to challenge your mind with problems daily. Like, for example, what’s causing the strange noises from your neighbor’s flat at night and whether he’s plotting to take over the world with robots.”

“Well, I can assure you that I’m not plotting to take over the world. With robots or anything else.” He sighed heavily, shifting two brown paper grocery bags from hand to hand. “Look, if I show you what I’m doing, will you stop complaining to the landlord? I’ve had to bribe him twice this month.”

“Oh no,” Jemma said, horrified. “You’re a drug dealer, aren’t you?”

“Of course not!” He looked offended at the very idea. “I’m an inventor. For an agency whose name I’m not allowed to say.” Jemma opened her mouth, about to run through all the names of every secret agency she’d ever heard of, and he lunged forward and placed a hand over her mouth. “Sorry about that,” he said when she made a muffled noise of protest. “Look, I’m going to take my hand away in a minute and then you can tell me what kind of gadget I can make you to make you go away.”

At least five different ones, Jemma thought grimly. And then she was going to talk him into taking her to his top-secret agency anyway.


	49. The Time of My Life (Fitzsimmons + next-door neighbors AU #2)

Leo Fitz did not like Dirty Dancing. Not when he’d first been coerced into seeing it by some of his girl cousins, not when he’d been forced to watch it by one of his ex-girlfriends, not during the day, not during the evening, and definitely not at eleven o’clock on a Monday night, blaring from the apartment above his head. 

So he marched upstairs, scowl fixed on his face, and rapped on Number Eleven’s door as loudly as he could. “Excuse me,” he shouted, trying to be heard over the music. “Some of us are trying to sleep down h–”

The door flew open and everything Fitz had planned to say flew out of his head. Because standing there, wrapped in a pink bathrobe and clutching a handful of tissues, was Jemma Simmons. His best friend from high school, partner in crime, and quite possibly the unrequited love of his life.

“Fitz,” she whispered, eyes wide.

“Simmons.”

“You’re, er, you’re here. I mean, you live here,” she blurted out. “I…I also live here.”

“I lived here first,” he said. Like an idiot. “You…are you all right?” He gestured to the living room he could see just over her shoulder, still covered with boxes and piles of tissues, Dirty Dancing at full blast on the TV.

“My boyfriend cheated on me,” Jemma said flatly. “With my roommate. I had to find a new place. So I suppose that no, I wasn’t all right.”

“Do you need anything? Tea, chocolate, revenge?” he offered, almost automatically. She laughed and almost seemed surprised to find herself doing it.

“I…why don’t you come in? We could talk?” She smiled up at him shyly, stuffing both hands in the pockets of her robe. “I think that if you stayed for a while, I might be all right after all.”


	50. She Came in Through the Bedroom Window (Fitzsimmons + childhood friends AU)

Jemma Simmons has been sneaking over to Leo Fitz’s house every night for the last three years, scrambling across the giant tree that stretched between both their rooms. But it’s definitely, absolutely not what it looks like. Everyone else sees the way that they speak in sync, how she sits right next to him even when there’s space left on the other end of the couch, how he looks to her before everyone else, and they _assume_. They assume all sorts of wrong things and it irritates Jemma to no end.

“People keep on thinking that I want to kiss you,” she says crossly after one holiday party, sprawled across Fitz’s bed as he tinkers with something at his desk. “They were after us with that awful mistletoe all night. I thought we were going to have to hide out in the bathroom to avoid it.” 

At his desk, Fitz makes a non-committal noise and bends down over whatever he’s working on. The very tips of his ears have turned pink and Jemma knows that that means he’s blushing madly everywhere else. She should probably stop talking about it but she’s still annoyed, even if she can’t pinpoint exactly why.

“Not that you were much help,” Jemma adds. “You just stood there every time and kept on eating all the Christmas cookies. Not the most effective strategy.” Fitz makes another non-committal noise. “Was there someone else you wanted to get caught under the mistletoe with? Because if you’d told me, then I could have helped you with it but if you just keep on mumbling things, I won’t be able to do any–”

“You’re the only person I want to kiss,” he blurts out and Jemma stops cold in the middle of the sentence.

“Sorry?”

“I said that you’re the only person I want to kiss,” Fitz repeats and turns to face her. He’s still blushing but he meets her eyes without looking away. “I just didn’t want the first time to be because of some stupid holiday tradition.”

“Oh. Well then.” Then they watch three episodes of Doctor Who together and don’t say anything else about it. But Jemma doesn’t notice a single thing that isn’t him for the whole time.

The next evening, Jemma climbs in through Fitz’s bedroom window, marches over to his desk, and does what everyone else thinks she’s been doing for the last three years. She kisses him sweetly and desperately and like she needs to do it more than she needs anything else. There are leaves tangled in her hair and scrapes down her arms from the tree bark and a crazed glint in her eye, but he kisses her back like he needs her more than anything else too. Like he’s needed her this much all along.


	51. Let It Snow (Fitzsimmons + Christmas drabble prompt)

Fitz wouldn’t stop looking at her. But then she wouldn’t stop looking at Fitz. It was the first snow of the year at the Academy and so she’d pulled him outside the minute that she saw the first flakes begin to fall, only pausing to make sure he put on his scarf and boots.

They’d embarked on a lengthy snowball war, as was tradition, and she’d fled from his perfectly aerodynamic snowballs, as was also tradition. But then when he’d come running after her, he’d tackled her a little too energetically and toppled them both over into the snow with a heavy thump. 

“We, ah, we should probably get up,” Fitz said from where she’d accidentally pinned him to the ground. His cheeks were bright pink from the cold and his eyes even brighter, staring right up at her, and Jemma felt something strange swell in her chest. Her best friend was really quite handsome and it seemed to have surprised her more than it should. Because you didn’t notice the way that your best friend looked, did you? (Or how he felt pressed against her, seemingly the only warm thing in the world, or the little smile tugging at the edges of his mouth when she still didn’t move off him.)

“No,” Jemma said firmly. “I think we shouldn’t.” And then she leaned down to press her mouth to his.


	52. Fitzsimmons + Malapert (clever in matters of speech)

Fitz thinks that this would be easier if she didn’t always know exactly what to say. Jemma Simmons is perfect and poised and brilliant, the right answer always hovering at the tip of her tongue, and whenever she so much as looks in his direction, Fitz’s tongue ties itself into eight separate knots. There’s a notebook, carefully hidden under his mattress and booby-trapped in case anyone stumbles across it, that has a list of all the clever things he’s come up with to say to her. Some of are articles from recent scientific journals, some of them are biology-themed puns, and some of them he found after a series of ill-considered Internet searches. If he just finds the right thing to say to her, if he practices it enough, if he finds the right time and right place and right everything, then maybe, somehow, he and Jemma Simmons can be friends.

But, as it turns out, the first thing he says to her isn’t the right thing at all. It’s his name, four letters that he blurts out so fast she has to ask him to repeat them when they get paired up for a lab. He can’t even meet her eyes when he says it, hands nervously tapping against his legs and gaze darting all around the room, and when he drops a beaker five minutes later, he’s convinced that he’s wasted any chance he ever had of being friends with her. It wasn’t the right words, it wasn’t the right way to say them, it wasn’t…but then Simmons sends another beaker crashing over the edge of the table and bursts into laughter.

“See, it’s not as bad if I’m clumsy too,” she says and smiles at him. And Fitz feels something new swell in his chest and thinks that maybe he said the right thing after all. That maybe all he ever needed to say was his name.


	53. Fitzsimmons + baisemain (a kiss on the hand)

It took one and a half days before the doctors let her go into his room and when they finally did, Fitz was barely visible beneath the tubes and wires. She could see his hand though, the one without an IV in it, and Jemma pulled her chair closer to the bed so she could hold on to it. 

She squeezed tight, even though she knew he wouldn’t squeeze back, and leaned down to briefly press her lips to the back of Fitz’s hand. He hadn’t liked being touched when Jemma had first met him at the Academy–he’d step away from a hug, letting his hands drop to his sides as quickly as he could, or perch on the opposite end of a couch even when there was plenty of space for them to sit closer together. But he’d warmed up to her eventually, until the feeling of Fitz standing next to her, close enough to whisper about everyone else around them, was as natural as waking up in the morning. 

Sitting here, saying things that she knew he would never hear, it was almost like they were back at the beginning again, eighteen and awkward with a million things they wanted to say buzzing around their heads and no way to say them. Except now there was only one thing she wanted to say, Jemma thought and squeezed his hand tighter. _Please come back, Fitz. I don’t know what I’ll do if you don’t._


	54. Mamihlapinatapei + Fitzsimmons  (Mamihlapinatapei–The look between two people in which each loves the other, but is afraid to make the first move)

Jemma thinks that there has to be a word for the all-encompassing terror she feels. Because she knows precisely how much she loves Fitz, the depth and weight and sheer overwhelming feel of it. She knows all the things she wants to have with him, the kisses and the nights spent curled around each other, the Saturday night dates that she’ll get dressed up for and the lazy Sunday morning breakfasts afterward, the days and days of the two of them that stretch ahead as far as she can imagine. She even knows how long she wanted him, can pinpoint the exact moment when something twisted inside her and love turned into in love. But the one thing she doesn’t know is how to tell him.

Some days, when they’re working in perfect sync in the lab and his hand brushes hers, or when she brings him a cup of tea in the morning, he’ll look at her, blue eyes intent, and she’ll wonder if he still feels the same. If all she has to do is close the distance between them with her words or her hands and he’ll meet her halfway. If it could be as simple as the three words they’ve never said to each other. 

And she thinks that someday she’ll have the courage to find out.


	55. Dair + Strikhedonia (the pleasure of being able to say 'to hell with it')

For most of her twenty years, Blair Waldorf had been the kind of person who cared. Outfits perfectly coordinated, headband nestled just so in her hair, minions chosen with care, plots executed with careful attention every step of the way. Every last thing mattered and if she did anything wrong, she might be the one person who didn’t.

But now, after Chuck had traded and twisted her in a dozen different ways, after she’d been up and down and up again more times than she can count, Blair just…didn’t anymore. She’d bought a Metrocard, she’d made her way to Brooklyn (for pie, no less), and now here she was, pie in hand (salted caramel apple, because she still had good taste even if it was pie) and on Dan Humphrey’s doorstep. 

“Blair?” He stared at her, eyes wide, and out of the corner of her eye Blair saw him discreetly pinch himself. “You’re here. in Brooklyn. With a pie?”

“I am. Here. With a pie and you. ” She tilted her chin stubbornly upwards and waited for him to take a hint.

“Am I allowed to ask why?” 

“I wasn’t going to come,” she admitted. “There’s a party that I’m supposed to be at, but I didn’t want to be there. So I got on the subway and I went to Brooklyn.”

“You took the subway?” Dan looked far too amused. She’d have to do something about that. 

“I didn’t bother to get a cab,” she shrugged. “It’s an intoxicating feeling, you know. Saying to hell with it all. But you can’t put that one in your next book, Humphrey,” she added quickly.

“What am I supposed to write about, then?”

She kissed him instead of giving him an answer and thought that not caring had never felt so good.


	56. Drink Up (Fitzsimmons)

Jemma had really thought that she could hold her alcohol. But three cocktails, an entire bottle of wine, and a tequila shot later, there was bright morning light pounding against her skull and a heavy weight against her side. 

“Why is there light?” she mumbled and rolled over to bury her face into the pillows. The strangely familiar pillows–she’d bought them for Fitz last spring when she realized he’d been using a folded up towel as a pillow.

“Don’t wanna pull down the blinds.” Fitz grumbled and snatched a pillow back from her.

“Well, someone has to. How much did we drink last night?” Jemma gingerly tried to inch over across the bed to grab more of the blankets and winced. Her head felt like an entire chorus of tap-dancing leprechauns had taken up residence inside it. 

“Too much. Come here,” Fitz snaked an arm around her waist and pressed his face against her shoulder. “My Jemma. Stay.”

“I am my own person, thank you very much,” Jemma said primly. Fitz must still have been drunk from last night–he never said things like that normally. And maybe it was the hazy morning light or the comforting weight of his head against her shoulder, but there was something she rather liked about it. His Jemma, her Fitz, each other’s best friends in the world.


	57. Fitzsimmons + "Unbind me"

Perhaps they are cursed after all, like Fitz said. A second too late, a step too far, a million tiny miscalculations and twists that send them sliding past each other, reaching out to grab each other’s hands and only brushing the tips of their fingers instead. Perhaps she has made too many mistakes and he has forgiven too much and perhaps they have fallen further apart the closer they get.

But Jemma thinks perhaps not. Because she’s made mistakes, but so has everyone else. So has he. And when he looks at her, she still feels like the only person in the world and when she looks at him, he still looks back like he can’t stop looking at her. Her heart still beats for him in a different rhythm than it beats for anyone else and in the moment when she sees him return from the other side of the universe, Jemma thinks that it may be time to stop believing in a curse. That maybe he needs to stop believing in it too.

She curls up beside him that night, her head on his chest and her hand wrapped through his, and when she’s on the edge of sleep, she tells him that she loves him. It is not grand or dramatic, on the beach at sunset or over a candlelit dinner, and she whispers it instead of shouting it, voice muffled through layers of sheets and flannel.

He believes her all the same.


	58. Fitzsimmons + "Don't do this"

“Fitz,” Jemma said, hands propped on her hips. “Fitz, don’t you dare leave this room.”

“What’s the point, Simmons? You’ve clearly decided that you’re taking the job, no matter what I say or whether or not I come with you,” Fitz snapped. “You’re so bloody stubborn, you know that?”

“That’s rich, coming from you. This is the opportunity of a lifetime, Fitz. Why can’t you see it?” Jemma pleaded, crossing the room to stand in front of him. “We’d get to work in the field, under a top team. See things that no one else has seen before, travel the world, make new discoveries, do everything that we can’t here.”

“We’re scientists, not field agents. And do you know what happens to scientists in the field? Nothing good. Look if you want to go, Simmons, I understand,” he said, his voice softening a little. “But I don’t think I could stand it if anything happened to you.”

“And you think that I could cope if anything happened to you? You’re my best friend and I–I can’t imagine life without you,” Jemma blurted out. “We’ll keep each other safe, promise. I mean, who’ll keep us out of trouble if you don’t come with me? You might end up burning down the whole of Sci Ops.”

“That was one time! At the Academy, so it barely counts,” Fitz protested and then they were off on another argument. But he’d stopped glancing over at the door and he almost smiled when she made a joke and eventually, Jemma thought, she’d wear him down. Eventually she’d have to wear him down. Because Leo Fitz was her best friend in the world and she wasn’t going anywhere without him.


	59. First Anniversary (Dair)

They didn’t last long enough to have an anniversary but Dan remembers each one anyway. It’s two years after they first kissed and he’s drinking coffee somewhere in Brooklyn, hunched over his laptop staring at the latest round of edits his publishing house sent over. This is his life now after his ill-advised trip to Rome with Georgina, writing and coffee and more writing and more coffee. Blair keeps on showing up in his books even when he doesn’t want her to. Serena doesn’t.

So when she sweeps in through the door of the coffee place, perfectly curated like always, he thinks for a minute that he’s imagining her. Then she goes up to the counter and orders a latte and a pistachio croissant in a voice that doesn’t sound like Blair at all, and he realizes that she’s real. 

“I went through six different hipster coffee places until I found you in this one,” Blair says and sits down across from him. “I haven’t spent this much time in Brooklyn in years.”

She’s got her chin held high and her eyes have that steely look in them, but her voice wavers before she finishes her sentences and she keeps on twisting her coffee cup around in her hands. She’s not quite all right, cracks around the edges where she pasted herself back together. Then Dan looks down at his laptop, where he’s written a string of adjectives without any nouns attached to them, and thinks that he may not be all right either.”

“Let me guess. You found a typo in my writing and had to come tell me in person?” he says, trying to make her laugh.

“Someone has to.” She takes another sip of coffee, stares down at the table. “It’s two years today, you know. I didn’t mean to count it–”

“But you did anyway. Blair,” he takes a deep breath and remembers the way that her name feels in her mouth. “Blair, is everything okay?”

“I don’t know.” The words come out of her mouth so slowly, like she’s never said them in that exact order before. There’s a look in her eyes that he recognizes, like she’s not sure how she got here from there, how they went from movies at midnight to this stiff conversation across coffee. Where they went wrong along the way..

Maybe they’re both a little lost but when he slides his hand across the table, she takes it and hangs on tight and he thinks that maybe they can go right.


	60. Partners in Crime (Karedevil)

Karen thinks that she can safely say she’s never spent a Valentine’s Day staking out a building. She and Matt have been standing in a stairwell across the street from their client’s apartment for the past three hours and the cold has now permanently taken up residence in her bones. At least there’s coffee, delivered by Foggy on his way to the mysterious Valentine’s Day date that he refuses to tell them anything about.

“You’re cold,” Matt says suddenly. He must have heard her shiver, though she’s been trying her hardest to keep her teeth from clacking together. “I’m sorry, I didn’t think–here, take my scarf.”

“I can’t do that,” Karen protests half-heartedly as he drapes it around her neck. It’s a massive scarf, a present from one of their clients, and she can already feel the chill starting to leave her skin. “What are you going to do?”

“I’ll survive,” he replies and zips his jacket up further. “We haven’t seen anything yet, might be time to call this off and come back in the morning. You can still get a little of your Valentine’s Day back.”

“Then what would you do?” She can’t stand the idea of Matt going back to his apartment, sitting there alone under the flashing lights, and so she says it without thinking it through first. “Look, I’ve got a bottle of wine and leftover roast chicken in my apartment. Come back with me instead.”

“You really want to spend Valentine’s Day with me?” he asks, trying to make it sound light.

“Matt,” she says and moves closer to him. “I already am.” 

She’s not sure if she kisses him or he kisses her first but it’s an electric shock down her spine either way, all lips and tongues and hands, and suddenly she can’t feel the cold at all. Matt is all heat, burning even through the layers of clothing that separate them, and she thinks that she wouldn’t mind if she burned up too.

And later, back in her apartment, up against the wall, pressed back against the cool metal of her refrigerator on her dining table, in the rumpled sheets of her bed, she does.


	61. Viva Las Vegas (Fitzsimmons)

“You realize that everyone’s going to be furious if we do this without telling them?” Jemma asked and tilted her face back to soak in the sun. She’d spent so long underground at the Playground, or running an operation from the jet, that letting the sun soak into her skin felt like a small luxury. 

“Your mum and dad’ll get over it and my mum’ll be fine once we send her a photo of us in ugly Christmas sweaters,” Fitz said with a shrug.

“I meant everyone at the base. Daisy’s going to use it to guilt trip us for months and Coulson will get that disappointed father look when we get back. May just won’t say anything,” Jemma said and laughed. 

“So you’re saying you don’t want to get married by an Elvis impersonator in a drive-through chapel?”

“No Elvis impersonator.” Jemma wrinkled her nose and slid her sunglasses down. “We’re going to have a classy elopement. Eloping? Whatever the noun form is.”

“The classiest elopement,” Fitz said and slid one hand across to squeeze hers. “Ice sculptures and everything.”


	62. The Man Without Fear (Karedevil)

The papers have started calling him The Man Without Fear and Matt is the only one who knows that it’s a lie. Because the thought of anything happening to Karen makes a strange sick feeling settle in the pit of his stomach. And, worst of all, he’s afraid that it already has. There’s a different note in her voice, something that wavers and shakes when she thinks no one’s listening, and late at night, he has dark blood-stained dreams of stopping whatever hurt her.

It’s strange, the way she makes him feel, good and bad all at once. It’s something delicate and yearning, balanced on a fine edge, and something deep and stormy at the same time. Because Matt has tried hard all his life to never be scared of anything but the way she catches at his heart is something that he thinks would terrify him if he let it.

“Matt,” she asks, leaning over his desk. “I found the files that you’ve been looking for. Anything else you need?”

“You,” he blurts out, still half in a daze.

Karen’s coffee cup crashes to the floor and when she speaks again, there’s something uncertain in her voice that he recognizes almost instantly. Maybe she’s afraid of whatever sparks between them too. But maybe they can be afraid together.


	63. Fitzsimmons + first flowers

At first, when Jemma woke up and stretched a hand across the bed to find empty sheets, she panicked. Last night had been a blur of swaying and laughing under the brightly colored lights with Skye, the warmth of tequila as it slithered down her throat, and the sudden shock when she’d seen Fitz walk through the door. She’d gone hurtling through the crowd to him, pulling him out onto the dance floor (Fitz was a surprisingly good dancer, once he rolled up his sleeves and forgot himself for a minute), and they’d stayed pressed together for the rest of the night. And then when the cab had been about to drop her off at her house, she’d slid her hand through his and asked him to stay the night.

Then she rolled over and saw a bunch of bright yellow daffodils sitting on her bedside table. _Went out to get food and coffee_ , a note on a Post-It read. _Be back soon. x, Fitz._

Her doorbell buzzed and she wrapped a sheet around herself to walk over and pull it open. Fitz was standing there, coffee carrier in one hand and wax paper bag of pastries in the other. “I went out to get stuff and the first time I took the key with me to get the flowers. But then I left it beside the flowers and then realized that I’d actually locked myself out of your apartment right when the door swung shut behind me. So at first I thought that maybe I could pick the lock but then I thought that that would be creepy so I decided to–”

Jemma surged forward and kissed him. The coffee nearly hit the ground. “Thank you,” she breathed. “Daffodils are my favorite.”

“I, er, I know. I’ve got donuts too. Blackberry ones and nutella ones.” Fitz held up the bag for proof. ‘If you’re letting me stay, that is?”

“Of course I am. Last night…last night has been about to happen for a very long time, I think.”

“I…I think so, too.” Fitz kissed her again and this time the coffee really did hit the ground. Miraculously, it survived.

They ate breakfast at her kitchen table, with the first flowers of the year between them, and as Jemma squeezed his hand under the table, she thought that spring, the very beginning of things, might be her new favorite season.


	64. Fitzsimmons + cuddling on couch

Jemma has decided that Fitz is an optimal human pillow. They’ve been friends for about six months now but he spent four of those six months being skittish around her and darting away whenever she so much as brushes against him. She suspects that he hasn’t been around girls much but she wants to shout that she’s not a girl, she’s _Simmons_. They’re Fitz and Simmons and they can say almost anything to each other at this point, even if he’s eminently wrong about who the best Doctor is. 

But tonight, they’ve been in the lab for fourteen hours straight and they’re both so tired that they can’t get through more than a sentence or two without yawning. Jemma’s been leaning on him for the past thirty minutes and when she actually slumps against him, she decides that it’s time to stop playing with flammable chemicals.

“Sleep,” she mutters and nudges Fitz in the side. “Sleep now.”

“Don’t wanna go back,” he replies and squeaks when she nudges his side again. “Couch.”

Jemma sighs–it’s a small couch, after all, and there’s a stain on it that might have been caused by acid–but then she gives in. She snuggles up next to Fitz, his arms wrapped firmly around her and her head tucked into the crook of his shoulder, and is perfectly content. In fact, as she cuddles closer, she thinks that just maybe, she could be perfectly content with this for the rest of her life.


	65. Double 007 (Fitzsimmons + James Bond AU)

“So tell me, Q, what does this do?” Jemma asks and reaches for a fragile-looking device perched on his workstation. Fitz’s eyes go wide and he reaches over to snatch it away before she can touch it. 

“That doesn’t quite work yet,” he says. “But when it does, it’ll knock out all electrical devices for a mile around for up to an hour.”

“You always have the best gadgets. I am sorry that they keep on getting destroyed, you know,” Jemma says with a wince. “Especially the car. I know that M was particularly upset about this one.”

“Extreme measures are necessary when fleeing that many henchmen. I thought that you were supposed to go in undercover on that op,” Fitz says, smile tugging at the corner of his mouth despite himself. She’s been able to charm Fitz ever since they both started at MI6, coaxing laughter and new devices out of him when he scowls at everyone else. She spends more time in his lab than she should, time that could be spent perfecting her Hindi or practicing her kickboxing, but somehow she feels more herself around him than anyone else.

“I don’t exactly do subtle well. Remember my first op, the time that I tried to flirt with and ended up knocking him out?” Jemma laughs. She’d panicked and shot him with one of Fitz’s first inventions, a nonlethal weapon he’d wanted to call the Night-Night gun. (She’d stopped him, luckily.) “I’m better now,” she adds when she sees an alarmed look cross his face. “I only break one or two gadgets per mission.”

“Be careful out there, 007, all right?” Fitz says as he hands her a communicator disguised as a compact, a tube of drugged lipstick, and a positively lethal watch. Their fingers brush when she takes them from him and if she didn’t know better, she would swear that a spark passes between them. But she has her assignment and Fitz has her lab and neither of them are entirely suited to a quiet life just yet.

“For you, Q, anything,” she says and leans over to drop a kiss on his cheek.

Her red lipstick leaves a bright mark on his skin. She likes it that way.


	66. Tripdaisy + reality show AU

“Remember, America loves you,” Daisy says, clipboard propped on one hip. “They’ve loved you ever since they saw you get your heart broken on national television.”

“Funny way of putting it,” Trip says as he holds a tie up against his shirt. He took a lot of convincing to be the lead this season after being brutally dumped on a beach in the Maldives by the last bachelorette. Most of it was her, arguing with her boss and the network and the advertisers until they finally caved. (He just doesn’t know that the beachside dumping was mostly her idea too, and it’s going to stay that way). She’d known that she wanted him to be the lead from the first moment he stepped out of the limo and flashed that perfect smile, no matter what she had to do along the way.

“Try the navy suit,” Daisy tells him. “I like the cut of it better.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he salutes her and sheds his shirt without even thinking about it. Daisy catches a glimpse of rippling muscles, swallows, and looks away. Fast.

“You know, maybe we should just keep you shirtless all season,” she says. “Ratings would go through the roof.”

“Hey! I was gonna eat that!” Trip protests as Daisy neatly swipes a bag of chips out of his hand.

“No eating on camera. Especially not food that’s made by one of our sponsors’ rivals. You want to get sued by Frito-Lay, be my guest,” Daisy tells him and props one hand on her waist.

“Isn’t that where your crack legal team comes in?” Trip shrugs and slides into the candle-lit confessional booth, still eyeing the weird kale chips she confiscated from him. “I know you’ve always got my back, Johnson.”

“Someone has to help you woo twenty-five women.” She should start asking him questions, about which women he likes so far, who he sees a connection with, who he’s unsure about…she should start doing her job. But instead Daisy tells herself that forging a personal connection is all part of the job and waves the sound guy away for now.

“Are you saying my moves aren’t smooth? Because they happen to be the smoothest.” Trip winks at her, huge and exaggerated, and Daisy breaks out into laughter, loud and full and more real than anything she’s done in ages.


	67. Fitzsimmons + first vacation together

They’re twenty-four, they’ve been living together for nearly three years (not that kind of living together, _god Agent Weaver_ ), they’ve known each other for even longer, and yet they’ve never managed to take a vacation together. SHIELD doesn’t really do time off, unless you’ve got a deadly disease. (And even then, they’d ask you to come in so they could study it.)

Fitz wants to go to Peru or some other tropical country where disastrous things are sure to happen to him, Simmons wants to go to Australia, where she can study venomous creatures to her heart’s content. But somehow they end up in Paris, trapped in a honeymoon suite that one of their coworkers offered up after calling off her wedding at the last minute, surrounded by kissing couples everywhere they turn.

“They’re blocking everyone’s view,” Fitz mumbles through a mouthful of eclair, standing in front of Notre Dame. 

“I think it’s rather romantic,” Jemma says thoughtfully. “Flying all the way to Paris to propose.”

“Don’t tell me what’s-his-name is going to propose,” Fitz says, horrified. He’s always tolerated Jemma’s current boyfriend, but now he’s already decided to sit on the couch like a frowning grandmother the entire evening the next time Nolan (what kind of a name is Nolan, anyway?) comes over.

“Absolutely not. And if he did, I would say no. I’m already married to science,” Jemma says. “So are you.”

“So in a way, we’re married to each other? Because honestly, Simmons, I don’t know who else would put up with your tendency to keep pieces of liver in the fridge,” he adds quickly. Jemma just laughs, tilting her head back, and Fitz can’t help thinking, only for a second or two, that she looks beautiful in the Parisian spring.


	68. Daisy + finding out about FS

It wasn’t much, when Daisy saw it. She was weak from blood loss, the world swimming before her eyes as she laid in the hospital bed and tried to count ceiling tiles to stay awake, and maybe if it had been something else, she would have thought that she’d imagined it. But there it was. Jemma’s hand in Fitz’s, her head leaning against his shoulder as she looked at Daisy with a worried expression. And there it was. Easy as the way Jemma leaned against Fitz like she knew he’d always be there, or how Fitz couldn’t seem to stop staring at Jemma as she took notes one-handed.

“I–I can’t,” she croaked.

“What is it?” Jemma rushed over to Daisy’s bedside. “What do you need? Fitz has a drone on standby if you–”

“I can’t believe that you two finally got together and I wasn’t there for it,” Daisy said and managed a smile. 

Fitz and Jemma beamed back at her.


	69. FS + wedding day

Leopold Fitz and Jemma Simmons get married in the middle of a crisis, to no one’s surprise. There’s another supervillain coming after them, armed with something absurd and threatening domination of most of the Pacific Northwest (the ones who threaten the world get saved for the Avengers), and that’s when Fitz decides.

“Marry me,” he says when they’re crouching behind a lab bench. “Right here, right now.” At first Jemma laughs, but then her eyes widen when she realizes he’s serious.

“No matter what happens, I want to be married to you,” Fitz says firmly. He pulls the ring out of his pocket, where he’s been keeping it for the past week and a half, nervously fingering the velvet box and never entirely sure what was the right time. It’s not exactly the proposal he was planning, but it’ll have to do for now. Jemma’s eyes go even wider.

“You better have a ring too,” she says and tilts her chin upward. “Partners in everything.” In the end, they tie a piece of string around the third finger of his left hand and decide that since it’s nice string, it counts.

Leo Fitz and Jemma Simmons say their wedding vows in a bombed-out lab under siege and the only person to witness them is Daisy, when she quakes her way through the rubble and nearly squeals the moment she spots the diamond on Jemma’s hand. Three weeks later, when their respective mothers find out that they were cheated out of a wedding, they’re remarkably indignant. Fitz and Jemma book a honeymoon trip to Bali and turn off their phones for a week and a half.

(They still have to have another wedding, if only because Coulson bribes at least three Avengers to be there.)


	70. FS + the morning after

Fitz steals the blankets. She never knew that before and she can’t help marveling at how strange it is. Her best friend steals the blankets and makes strange grumbling noises in his sleep and wraps an arm around her waist to keep her as close as he can get. Her best friend who is irretrievably, irredeemably more than her best friend. 

Jemma spent so much time turning the problem of them around from so many different angles, examining every possible consequence until her mind was dizzy from the calculations. But now all she feels is happiness. At first she doesn’t recognize the warmth that floods through her when she feels Fitz’s arm around her waist, the heady, dizzy feeling pumping through her veins. Because she’s been in like and in lust and (maybe) in love, but it’s never felt quite like this before, like she’s been infused with sunshine. Because maybe she’s never been in love like this before.

She leans over to kiss Fitz awake and drags one hand through his curls as she deepens the kiss. He mumbles her name against her mouth before kissing her back and drawing her down to him. 

“Do we have time before the jet leaves?” he murmurs when she moves to straddle him properly.

“Right now,” Jemma promises. “We have all the time in the world.”


	71. Karedevil + high school AU (mildly NSFW)

Everyone says that the Murdock boys have the devil in them, but Karen Page knows that’s not true. Everyone says that Matt Murdock nearly got suspended for getting into too many fights, but Karen knows that the only reason he gets into fights is to stop anyone else from getting hurt. Everyone says that Matt Murdock kisses like he’s sin itself, but Karen is the only one who knows that it’s something even better.

Matt presses her back against the lockers in a deserted hallway and kisses along the long line of her throat, sucking a bruise into bloom. The last time he apologized for leaving marks scattered along her neck and shoulders when he felt them, tracing one finger along the edges of her collarbone and down even deeper, but she likes the reminders. Now, she curls her hands tightly into his shirt as he scrapes his teeth gently against her skin and pulls it up until she can flatten one palm against the taut muscle of his stomach. This is something else that no one else knows about, all the muscle hidden underneath his soft cotton t-shirts, and normally Karen doesn’t like secrets but she’d be happy to keep this one.

She presses her hips against his and Matt groans deep in his throat. “We really sh–” he stops, breath caught in his throat when she shifts just a little, enough to feel him hard against her. “We really, really shouldn’t.”

“Why not?” she breathes. Karen has always been just a little bit reckless, under the flower print dresses and perfect grades, and something about Matt pushes her right over the edge. He sets her blood humming in her veins and heat swarming through her, until he’s all she can think about and she thinks she might go crazy if she doesn’t see him right this minute. 

“Because anyone could see us and we nearly got caught last week,” he whispers. “Remember under the bleachers?”

He’d gone down on her and she’d had to keep one hand clamped over her mouth so she didn’t make too much noise. She’d been loud anyway. 

“Vividly,” she says and can’t help sighing. Despite his protests, Matt’s been working on the buttons of her shirt and he slips one hand inside to tease her through the lace of her bra. “Your car?” 

“Foggy has it for today. Sorry,” he says with a wince when she groans in frustration. 

“How are you going to make it up to me?” she asks and feels herself blush bright pink. “My parents are out of of town this weekend, you know.”

“You really want the details?” he asks. Matt’s all polite and proper with her parents, offering to set the table and talking about his plan to be pre-law, but when it’s just them, he’ll tell her everything he wants to do to her until she tells him what she wants right back.

“God, I do,” she says and lets her head fall back against the lockers when he slides his other hand up her skirt and traces the lace edging her underwear. They’re going to get in so much trouble if they get caught, after the chemistry classroom and the dressing room backstage at the theater, but Karen can’t bring herself to care.

“You…you make me so happy,” he says softly against her lips, tracing words against her skin that she thinks she almost knows. “From the first time you walked into freshman algebra and I heard your voice. It sounded like sunshine, you know that? And I knew then that you were it.”

“Do you want to know something?” she murmurs. “I knew then too.”

Everyone knows that Karen Page is crazy about Matt Murdock, but Karen is the only one who knows he’s even crazier about her.


	72. FS + sneaking around

Jemma Simmons has never been a sneaky person, exactly. She failed the covert surveillance portion of her field training course in a rather spectacular fashion and the first few months of her time in the field had seemed to consist of her failing at sneaking around a few more times. (In her defense, Agent Sitwell did later turn out to be HYDRA.) She got better at it when she was undercover but even then she has to admit that transferring information on her lunch break, outdoors and in plain sight, may not have been the best tactic.

Now, though, she is going to be the queen of sneakiness. She’s studied up on the topic and tried to discreetly get a few tips out of May and she is going to get across the base to Fitz’s room without anyone noticing. 

She’s wearing all black so she blends into the shadows of the Playground and she’s sticking very close to the walls and she even wore her quietest pair of sneakers. It may not be her sexiest outfit but Fitz looks at her with wide and amazed eyes no matter what she’s wearing. She creeps around corners and weaves her way down hallways and when she finally reaches Fitz’s door and knocks on it triumphantly, she informs him that she would definitely pass the covert surveillance course now.

(Both May and Elena spotted her on her way through the hallways. Neither of them say anything about it.)


	73. FS + "Singin' in the Rain" AU

“Let me show you how we make movies,” Jemma says and throws open the massive doors of an empty studio. She’s dashing inside and throwing switches on the light panel before Fitz can ask her if they’re even allowed to be in here. 

“But this…there’s not even a set in here,” he blurts out and feels himself color. He used to think that Jemma Simmons was beautiful on the big screen, her perfect profile opposite her co-star Will Daniels, but she’s even more stunning up-close and as much as he’d like to say that she doesn’t affect him, keep up the tough act that he put on when she plummeted into his car, his rapidly beating heart is already making a liar out of him. 

“Wait and see. Now stand there, on the ladder. Bottom rung..” Jemma gestures and he goes without so much as a complaint. “It’s a warm summer night, the breeze blowing through the valley, the moon shining down in a clear sky. A young man stands in a garden, hoping to see the woman he loves.”

She flicks on a massive fan, sending a breeze rushing through the studio, and swivels the spotlight to face him. The light is nearly blinding but Fitz can just make out her silhouette through it. She’d shine without a spotlight on her anyway.

“And now we’ll add a few watts of stardust,” Jemma says, throwing the switches on a massive array of colored lights. “And….” She pauses, meets his gaze. “You, ah….moonlight quite suits you, Fitz.”


	74. Thoroughly Modern Skye (Tripskye, Thoroughly Modern Millie AU)

Skye doesn’t want anything to do with Antoine Triplett. She doesn’t need his advice on life in the big city or offers to take her dancing or stupidly wide smile. She has her sights set on Lincoln Campbell III, CEO of Campbell Industries Inc. and she’s certainly not going to settle for anything less.

“You know, they do a pretty good Bee’s Knees at the Playground. Maria Hill sings there some nights too,” he says, leaning against the side of her building. “Real hot jazz.”

“If you think I’m going out with you, Mr Whoever-You-Are…”

“Triplett,” he supplies easily.

“Mr. Triplett,” Skye goes to toss her newly bobbed hair and realizes that there isn’t enough to toss. She settles for turning sharply on her heel instead. “You have another think coming.”

“Saturday night!” he calls after her. “Any Saturday night you like!”

And if, the next Saturday night, she finds herself hovering around the front door of the Playground, keeping a look out for a certain smile, well it’s just a detour on her way to high society. A detour that dances better than anyone she’s ever known.


	75. FS + Hamilton

He’s penniless. He’s from an island in the middle of the Caribbean that no one’s ever heard of, the bastard son of a poor woman and a Scotsman. No one in New York has ever heard his name. (Not yet, anyway.)

And Jemma is helpless.

It’s a hot summer night in New York and when he walks through the door, her eyes can’t help going to him. Her heart surges beneath her corset and the only thing she can think, hot and fierce, is mine. She crosses the ballroom and before she knows it, they’re talking. Fast and easy and perfectly matched, trading words and ideas back and forth at a pace that she’s never found with anyone else.

Jemma wants to ask him what kind of future he imagines for their country. Jemma wants to tell him about the revolutionary pamphlets she’s been reading. Jemma wants to never stop talking to him. Jemma wants….She glances across the ballroom and sees her sister. 

And the look in Daisy’s eyes is one that Jemma knows all too well. And Jemma…Jemma thinks that Fitz is more right than he knows. She will never be satisfied.


	76. Eavesdropping (FS + things you said that I wasn't meant to hear)

1\. “I’d rather work alone, Professor,” Leopold Fitz says loudly. Too loudly. Jemma stares down at her lab table, cheeks burning, and tries to restrain herself from throwing something at his stupid Scottish head.

“This is a partner assignment, Mr. Fitz. Working by yourself would rather defeat the point of it, wouldn’t it?” Their professor strides away, leaving no room for Fitz to protest, and he slowly slumps over to their assigned table. He won’t even meet her eyes as he sets his backpack down with a thump.

Well then. Jemma tilts her chin up and grits her teeth. She’ll prove to Leopold Fitz that she’s the best damn lab partner he could ever have asked for

2.They’re at Sci-Ops by now and Jemma likes to think that she’s proved to Fitz about a hundred times over that she’s the best partner he’ll ever have, largely because she’s always right. (No matter what he says about Tony Stark.) But despite the fact that she’s always right, they still argue. Like right now, in the middle of a bar. The large amount of tequila they’ve both consumed might also have something to do with it.

Jemma heads off to the bar to get them another round of drinks and while she’s weaving her way through the crowd back over, she hears Fitz talking to Hank McCoy, one of their colleagues at Sci-Ops.

“You and Simmons never stop arguing, do you?” McCoy asks, shaking his head in bemusement. “We’ve got a betting pool going over how long it’ll take to have that lab of yours blow up.

“’s how we get things done.” Fitz shrugs. “Besides, she’s kind of beautiful when she’s mad, isn’t she?”

The next time that they get into a screaming match, Jemma diligently pretends that she never heard him.

3\. “I only came because of Simmons,” Fitz tells Skye. They’re sitting around the dining room table in the Bus eating pizza and Jemma is hovering at the edge of the kitchen. She should go in, let them know that she’s here, but she can’t help staying in the doorway, waiting to see what Fitz says next.

“She wanted a big adventure,” Fitz says. “We fought and fought about it but I think I always knew I was going to go. She’s my best friend, you know? I’d follow her anywhere.”

Jemma feels something warm and indefinable catch inside her chest.

4\. They haven’t been talking. Not properly, not really. So she’s been reduced to skulking around the garage trying to eavesdrop on him and Mack.

“She’s not the kind of person you can just get over,” Fitz says softly. He’s twisting something in his hands and avoiding Mack’s eyes. “Believe me, I tried. But Jemma—when I first met her, I spent weeks trying to think of the right thing to impress her. I’d write ideas down in my notebooks for inventions I could propose to her, think that I saw her in the dining hall and hide behind the waffle maker…I couldn’t stop thinking about her. Still can’t.”

Jemma wants to tell him that she can’t stop thinking about him either. Instead she goes back to her bunk and cries for the next hour.

5\. “Of course, I bought the ring at Tiffany’s,” Fitz says, offended. “Do you want to inspect it too? May already gave it her stamp of approval. More like the silent nod of approval, really.”

“You double checked her ring size?” Coulson asks anxiously. “Because you’ll want to make sure that–”

Hidden from sight in the living room, Jemma beams with happiness.


	77. Han bloody Solo (FS + things you said at the back of the theater)

“They can’t do that! You can’t just kill off Han bloody Solo!” someone shouted from the back of the audience. Jemma turned around to fiercely glare at whoever had dared to interrupt the movie. Honestly, did they have no ideas of etiquette?

“It’s a second movie death, at least,” the voice continued. “Not something you put out right there in the first movie. I mean, we already knew this Kylo Ren was the big villain. Didn’t have to have him kill his own father for us to get that!”

“Shhh,” Jemma hissed from her seat. The voice just kept on talking.

“Not to mention that Han Solo is an integral part of the fran–”

Right. That was it. Jemma Simmons had had enough of some man who thought he knew all about Star Wars ruining the first new film in ten years for an entire movie theater’s worth of people. She got up out of her seat, marched up the aisle, and stopped when she got to where she estimated the voice had come from.

“For your information,” she said in a piercing whisper. “Han was supposed to die in Return of the Jedi. So this is just thirty years overdue.”

“He was not!” The owner of the voice stood up and revealed himself to be…much different than what Jemma had expected. Younger, for one. She’d imagined some cranky middle-aged man who had spent his childhood getting relentlessly teased for carrying a Star Wars lunchbox to school every day. This man looked to be about the same age as she was. Rather handsome, really, with sandy hair and eyes that were shockingly blue even in the dark of the movie theater.

“He absolutely was.”

“Was not!”

“Was!” Jemma retorted, feeling rather like she was back on the playground in primary school. “Besides, the whole film is quite clearly built according to the same structure as A New Hope, so it was about time for a key paternal authority figure to bite the dust.”

“Bite the dust?” He stared at her, horrified. “That’s rather a callous way of putting it, isn’t it? I bet you would have been one of those people who hoped Leia would end up with Luke back before everyone found out they were siblings.”

Jemma gasped in indignation. “I happen to be very fond of Han and Leia, thank you v–”

“Sir? Madam? I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to leave the theater.” A usher appeared in the aisle and fixed them both with a stern look. “You’re disrupting the movie.”

“I can’t believe that you got me kicked out of there. I’ve been waiting to see that movie for years!” Jemma whirled on him once they were outside of the theater and fixed him with her best intimidating look, the one that her best friend Daisy said made her look like an angry kitten.

“You were the one who told me to shut up in the first place,” he pointed out and smirked at her.

“Only because you were ruining the movie for everyone in the–”

“Look, I’ll buy you another ticket. Popcorn too,” he added quickly and smiled shyly at her, suddenly nervous. In the light, he looked even better. “I’ve never met anyone who could, ah, who could argue with me that like before. Maybe I could buy a ticket too and we could, um, sit together? Not together together. Just near each other. I promise not to say anything this time.”

He broke his promise ten minutes in. Much to her surprise, Jemma didn’t mind.


	78. Road Trip (FS + "things you said while you were driving")

“You remembered the atlas, right?” Jemma asked as she shoved her final suitcase into the trunk of Fitz’s beloved cherry red Corvette. (He claimed that it didn’t have a name but she’d heard him whispering “Calm down, Lola.” every time the car threatened to stall out.)

“Er, sort of. Google Maps counts, doesn’t it?” Fitz said and scrubbed a hand through his wildly curly hair. “No one uses atlases anymore.”

“What if we don’t get reception somewhere? We could end up stranded in Iowa, Fitz. Iowa!” They’d been planning this cross-country road trip to celebrate their college graduation for the past year—for most of college, really—and she had nightmares of running out in gas in the middle of a cornfield.

“Fine, then. We’ll buy an atlas before we leave,” Fitz grumbled. Jemma shot him a triumphant grin.

 

 

“Fitz! Stop just there! It’s a national historic site.” Jemma brandished her guidebook at him. She was determined not to miss a single Civil War battlefield, despite Fitz’s distinct lack of enthusiasm for the subject, and she’d even marked each one on the map of their route with a neat little cannon in red pen.

“I don’t see why you bought that guidebook, Jem. We did go to college in the States for four whole years—we saw every single historic site New England had to offer.” Fitz had several unpleasant memories of being woken up at ungodly hours of the morning to look at churches and village greens where George Washington had once stopped his horse for five minutes. Or something like that.

“But none from the Civil War.” Jemma was bouncing around in her seat now, clutching the guidebook tight to her chest with wide shining eyes. 

“All right,” Fitz sighed and pulled the car off the road. From the moment she’d asked to borrow his teakettle freshman year, he’d never gotten the knack of saying no to Jemma Simmons.

 

“Isn’t it amazing?” Jemma breathed. They were driving down the California coast, all sheer rock and twisted trees and stormy water, and Jemma was enchanted as she stared out the window and rolled it all the way down to breathe in the salt air. “Isn’t it the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen?”

“Of course,” Fitz said automatically. It wasn’t. He’d just realized that Jemma Simmons was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. He’d have to do something about that.


	79. Through the Years (Dair)

At eighteen, Blair Waldorf insulted Dan Humphrey. Quite a lot. He insulted her right back. And although she never would have admitted it, she got a little zip of electricity down her spine every time he rolled his eyes at her and submitted yet another hopelessly wrong opinion about literature. She hadn’t had a sparring partner this good in ages. (Chuck’s style ran more to convoluted plots and suggestive whispers that used to get her all hot and bothered and now just bothered her.) Sometimes, late at night in her weaker moments, she was even able to admit that in the right light, he could be handsome.

At eighteen, she didn’t like Dan Humphrey—not exactly—but she did like having him around. At seventy, she can’t imagine her life without him. 

“You know,” he says, frowning over the draft of his latest novel. “The next time we see our grandkids, I’ve been warned that we’ll be asked how we met.”

“What do you want to tell them? That we hated each other for years, became friends, kissed once, went back to being friends, nearly never got together because I married a prince, got together, broke up, got together again and–”

“Yes,” Dan says firmly. “I want to tell them every last bit of it. Because every last bit ended with us together.”

“Who knew you’d go sentimental in your old age, Humphrey?” Blair sniffs. But after a minute, she goes to sit beside him and drops her head onto his shoulder. And after all these years, their hands fit together just as neatly as they did when they were eighteen.


	80. FS + "Things you said but not out loud"

The thing is, Fitz has never told her that he loves her. Not out loud, not distilled down to those three simple words that might simultaneously be the most complicated thing in the universe. She’s more than that, he dove through a hole in the universe for her, they’ve crossed the event horizon…Really, they’ve come so close to saying it a million times already. But not quite the way she wants. 

She wills him to say it when he makes tea for her, when he wraps his arms around her and pulls her close in the morning, when he kisses her goodnight. She wills him to say it when they go on vacation together, when they move into their new flat, when they watch fireworks and he kisses her at New Year’s. But when he finally says it, he doesn’t really say it at all. He just looks over at her, one sunny morning, and Jemma knows that he finally believes it. She loves him. He loves her. Maybe they always have.


	81. Dair + things you always meant to say but never got the chance

Blair was going to tell him. She really was. If it had been anyone else, she would have insisted on them saying it first, on planting her feet on solid ground before she took a great leap into the unknown, but Dan didn’t play those kinds of games. Dan was the warm feeling of his arms around her and the soft collar of his plaid shirt and the low murmur of a classic movie in the background and the certain conviction that he would love her no matter what. And Dan made her heart thump and her blood pulse and her lungs breathe and her mind stop twisting itself into anxious patterns. And Dan made her feel safe and Dan made her feel like she deserved something good and Dan—Dan never knew how she felt.

She’s back with Chuck now. Everything is the way it should be. Glass of champagne in her hand, giant diamond sparkling on her finger, and something she can’t quite identify in her heart. Late at night, lying awake in bed and staring up at the ceiling, she thinks that it might be the feeling of her heart breaking. Early in the morning, Blair tells herself that that’s ridiculous. She tells herself that she’s happy when she’s crying, that she’s okay when she’s not, and that she’s going to go through with everything Chuck has planned when the very thought of it makes her feel like she can’t breathe.

Blair paces the penthouse while Chuck’s away and makes a list of all the things she should have said. She should have told Dan that she was sorry. She should have told Dan that he was right about Elizabeth Taylor. She should have told Dan that she didn’t hate Brooklyn nearly as much when he was there. She should have told Dan that she thought they made each other better people. She should have told Dan that she never wanted to stop kissing him. She should have told Dan that she loved him.

A voice that sounds suspiciously like her mother in her head says well, why don’t you?

It’s a sunny September morning when she packs her suitcases, leaves her engagement ring sitting on Chuck’s kitchen counter, and takes the subway to Brooklyn. (That’s when she knows, really, when she doesn’t think twice before running down the steps and onto a rattling, overcrowded, stuffy train to get to him.)

When she bursts into his apartment, he stares up at her with wide eyes. “Blair,” he says and she hears the ache in his voice that is now her name. “Blair, what are you doing here?”

“Choosing,” she says. “Choosing you and me and us.”

“There’s a million things I always meant to say to you, you know,” he tells her slowly. “I—I thought I was going to have to write them down instead.”

“Tell me then,” Blair says. “And maybe I’ll tell you some too.”


	82. The Brooklyn Bridge (Dair)

“And that’s how I ended up standing naked on the Brooklyn Bridge on Christmas Eve,” Dan says smugly.

“Honestly, Humphrey,” Blair sighs. “It had to be the Brooklyn bridge, didn’t it?”

“What, do you want me to get drunk on top of the Empire state Building instead? Because that can be arranged, Waldorf.” Dan holds up a bottle of cheap wine. “The possibilities for places to get drunk in are limitless.”  
Dan shakes the bottle of wine at her, grinning absurdly, and Blair feels herself giving in. She and Dan are finally done with finals at NYU and everyone else is already out of town—Serena in Aspen, Nate upstate at the family house, her mother off on a research trip for Waldorf Designs…That’s the only reason she’s hanging out with Dan, the complete and utter lack of any other company. (She thinks.)

 

“I’ll even throw in a Hepburn movie afterward,” Dan offers.

 

“Audrey or Katherine?” Blair narrows her eyes at him suspiciously. 

 

“You can pick.” That’s what seals it. (She thinks.)

 

They end up perched out on his fire escape, drinking wine out of plastic cups and eating pizza that ordinarily Blair wouldn’t even touch with her bare hands. She blames the summer air and the way the sunset seems to edge everything in gold, making even Dan look…well, good. Handsome, even, with his sleeves rolled up and his eyes alight as he talks about the book he wants to write.

 

She only kisses him because she can’t bear to hear any more about the symbolism of the golden retrievier. (She thinks.)


	83. Strong Coffee (Quakerider)

Robbie Reyes drives like a madman. Which he might be. But as she considers everything shes’ done over the past few months, Daisy decides she isn’t in any position to judge.

He drives at a speed that sends the needle on the odometer veering wildly off to the right, he careens around hairpin turns that take them alarmingly close to the edge of cliffs once they get to the coast, and he charges ahead of any car that gets in their way, ignoring the curses that other drivers shout after him. A few months ago, Daisy might have told him to slow down before he got them both killed. 

Now, she just leans against the headrest and digs her fingers into the leather of the seat. Not hard enough to make her fractured bones ache but hard enough to remind herself of the pain. 

“So do you want to tell me where we’re going or is this just a demonstration of the Reyes method for getting a speeding ticket?” she asks.

“The cops won’t catch us. This car just slips right past them. Like it’s not even there.” Robbie tightens his grip on the steering wheel, his knuckles turning white around the edges. “Still, I wouldn’t mind getting a speeding ticket now and then.”

“Proof that it’s all real,” Daisy says softly. She slipped and fell down the rabbit hole and out of the real world years ago, into a place of secret bases and boys who could hold electricity between their hands and stones that sent her best friend halfway across the galaxy. It had been strange after she left SHIELD, seeing people getting coffee and buying their groceries and going about their days without considering all the million different ways tragedy could strike. Leading lives that only belonged to them.

“Oh, I know I’m real, chica. It’s everything else I’m worried about.”

“Do you want to stop for coffee?” Daisy blurts out. Suddenly, she wants to buy a cup of overpriced coffee and a sticky-sweet Danish, wants to hold something in her hands that isn’t magic or science or secret, wants to be reminded that the world holds more things than quinjets and people who die of unnatural causes. “Even ghosts need coffee, don’t they?”

“Yeah,” Robbie says. “Yeah, I think they do.”

He glances over at her and even though she doesn’t look back, she can feel his gaze prickle down her spine. She has the funny feeling that he knows more about her than she wants him to.

He insists on paying for her coffee and they argue about it in the parking lot for a good fifteen minutes. (She wins.) Daisy thinks that just maybe, she knows more about him than he wants her to too.


	84. Let's be Professional (FS + professors AU)

“You know,” Fitz says, surveying his students. All the usual suspects are present: the English majors carrying around bookstore totes stuffed with paperbacks, the jocks who needed a humanities credit, the red-lipsticked drama majors whispering to each other who heard that he lets people act out scenes in his classes. “If you like my Shakespeare class, you should really take Professor Simmons’ revenge tragedy class as well. Shakespeare’s only part of the Elizabethan theater world, despite the scholarly focus on his work. She examines all these works from a feminist perspective–Middleton, Webster, Ford. Last year, she even took her class to a performance of The White Devil, which is quite a feat, considering how infrequently The White Devil–”

Even the drama majors don’t seem to have heard of The White Devil. A pity, really. Professor Simmons has been hoping to direct it for the drama department someday soon.

“Right then,” Fitz sighs. “London, 1594. The Comedy of Errors, an adaptation of Plautus’ The Brothers Menaechmus. Professor Simmons has actually written a fascinating essay on the influence of Latin drama on the theater of the English Renaissance, if any of you are interested.”

 

“Professor Fitz’s course actually makes a perfect complement to this one,” Jemma tells her students. “He’s quite the expert on Shakespeare. In fact, if you’re interested in the romances, he has a book coming out next year.”

Perhaps she should preorder a copy in advance, just to make sure she has one. Jemma tries to support all of her colleagues’ endeavors, of course, but Fitz…Fitz is something else entirely. Especially when he meets her in her office late at night and kisses her senseless.


	85. FS + teacher AU

The first year that Jemma Simmons starts teaching theater at Rogers High, Fitz offers to fix the one wonky spotlight for her. It takes him thirty minutes and when Jemma beams at him and brings him a container of homemade chocolate chip cookies the next day, he flushes bright red and decides to fix the entire lighting system. It was due for some rewiring anyway.

Her second year, he builds her a set. It’s simple, a forest for her production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, vines winding up the trees and colorful flowers tugging into the crooks of branches.

“It’s beautiful,” she breathes and spins around to take it all in. “How did you manage to do all this?”

“Simple, really. I told all my AP Physics students they could get extra credit if they helped build it.”

She laughs and Fitz commits the sound to memory. The next week, she brings him a blueberry coffee cake and a thank-you card signed by everyone in the play. There’s a heart after her signature and he tells himself that keeping the card would just be stupid.

Her third year, he builds her a carriage for Cinderella and she brings him handmade pistachio macarons. “I have to thank you somehow,” she says wryly when she peers around the door to his classroom.

“It’s not–I don’t mind doing it. Quite like it, actually. I think that the arts are very, ah…very important. What you do is very important.”

Jemma looks at him, eyes wide and bright, and leans in to press a quick kiss to his cheek.

Her fourth year, he builds her three working sets for Nicholas Nickleby and goes antiquing with her on the weekends for furniture and stays late through all of the technical rehearsals. On opening night, he asks if he can buy her a drink.

“To celebrate,” he blurts out. “For all your hard work and–”

Jemma throws her arms around him and kisses him like no one’s watching. (They are. There might even be applause. Fitz doesn’t care.)


	86. FS + ice cream tasters AU

Jemma Simmons is a woman on a mission. A fudge mission, which admittedly sounds a great deal less intimidating, but a mission nonetheless. SHIELD Enterprises is famous for its chocolate fudge ice cream and for the past three days, the fudge has been…disappointing. Quite appalling, if she’s being frank.

So as the head of the tasting division, she has been sent to rain polite hell upon whoever’s been altering their award-winning fudge recipe.

“I mean it’s good, yeah, but it could taste better,” Leopold Fitz, soon-to-be-former chief fudge supervisor, says with a shrug. “We’ve been tinkering around with the recipe a bit, see if we can get the chocolate flavor to really come through.”

“Want to try some? I think recipe number twelve might actually be the one,” he adds and grins at her. He has a beautiful smile, she thinks. It makes the blue of his eyes even bluer, if that’s scientifically possible. A nice jawline, too, strong and dotted intriguingly with stubble that–that has absolutely no bearing on the subject at hand.

Jemma draws herself up to her full (admittedly not very tall) height and informs him that all tinkering should happen after hours. “Especially if it interferes with company workflow,” she says. “Do you have any idea how much this could hold up production? You–you could be depriving children of their Sunday treat!” 

“I’ve been working on other recipes too. Cookies and creme, peanut butter–”

“Mr. Fitz,” she says sharply and tries to ignore how the rolled up sleeves of his shirt reveal a pair of very nice forearms. “When we begin manufacturing peanut butter fudge ice crem, I promise that you will be the first to know.”

Then she stalks off. 

The next day, there’s a box with three different kinds of fudge and a handwritten invitation to dinner sitting on her desk. She’s not quite sure what to make of it.


	87. FS + parent-teacher conference AU

“I wasn’t aware that Rosie had a father,” Jemma blurted out. “I mean, everyone has a father. I just wasn’t aware that you, ah, lived in town. It’s normally only been Ms. Foster at Rosie’s conferences and as she’s mentioned that she’s divorced, I–”

“I don’t normally. I travel a lot for work but I, er, was in the neighborhood and thought I’d stop by to see how she was…progressing,” Fitz mumbled. 

Jane ( sweet, lovely Jane, who never sent her demanding emails and always brought cookies for the bake sale while the rest of the parents wanted to sell their gluten-free granola, who made a special donation to the science program, who was her very favorite of all the parents) simply looked between them in confusion. 

“We, er, met the other night,” Fitz finally volunteered. It was true, technically. They had met. At a bar. And at her apartment afterward. And at brunch the next morning. 

And stupidly enough, she had seen…potential. Possibility. Something small and delicate and entirely unlike anything she had felt before. Something in the glances he had snuck over at her and the spirited debate they’d had about Doctor Who, about the way he’d looked at her bookshelves with delight and kissed her with single-minded concentration. Until, of course, he had told her that he had to get on a plane to Kuala Lumpur. Apparently with a detour to see his daughter which, shockingly enough, he’d failed to mention.

Jemma narrowed her eyes at him and tried to fold her papers in a threatening manner. “Well then,” she said. “How nice of you to take such interest in her..progress.”


	88. FS + roommate AU

Jemma Simmons is the best roommate Fitz could have ever asked for. She mops the kitchen floor once a week, she’s always willing to order Chinese food with him, and she didn’t even blink when she saw his collection of Funko Pops. (Hers is bigger.) She’s considerate and neat and quiet and practically perfect in every way. 

Except, of course, for the fact that he’s madly in love with her.

She’s going out on a date tonight, with some ridiculous guy named Milton that she met in the vegetable aisle of Whole Foods, and Fitz is trying very hard not to sulk on the couch and to concentrate on the stack of physics papers he’s grading. He can hear her humming from the bathroom, where she’s been doing her makeup for the past fifteen minutes, and smell the faint floral traces of her perfume and if he cranes all the way over the corner of the couch, he can spot all the rejected outfits for tonight sprawled across her bed. Milton is not going to appreciate the effort.

“Where’s he taking you anyway?” he shouts from the living room.

“The new seafood place that opened over on Third,” she says. “It’s supposed to be good.”

“But you don’t like seafood. You’re always saying that it tastes too salty.” If Fitz was going to take her to dinner, he wouldn’t pick the place without asking her what she liked. He would take her to the tiny Italian restaurant she’s always shooting longing glances at and out for ice cream afterward. He would listen to every single word she said and laugh at her terrible puns and—it’s pointless speculation, really. Pointless because they’re never going to be anything other than friends. Pointless because he doesn’t want to be that guy, the one who expects something she doesn’t want to give.

“Well, Milton doesn’t know that.” Jemma peers around the edge of the bathroom, smoothing down her dress and tucking one last curl behind her ear. “How do I look?”

“B—beautiful.” She does, in her red sweater and short suede skirt, her hair falling in loose curls around her shoulders and her eyes shining with excitement. She practically glows and Fitz feels a sharp ache in his chest. “I mean, you always look beautiful but…especially tonight.”

He bends his head back over his papers and hopes that she doesn’t notice the flush spreading up the back of his neck.

“Really?” she says quietly. “You think I always look beautiful?”

“Of course,” he mumbles and bends back further over his papers. “I’d have to be an idiot not to.”

When he finally dares a glance up at her, he sees that she’s blushing too.


	89. Diabolical Revenge (FS)

“Hunter? Hunter?”

“Look, I can see a light on. I know you’re in there.”

“If you had just given me the bloody toolbox back in the first place, this wouldn’t be a problem.”

“I’ve created a timeline, you know. August 25th , 2016: one Leo Fitz agrees to lend his toolbox to his supposed friend Lance Hunter so he can fix his porch railing. September 8th, 2016: Leo Fitz asks how the porch repairs are going. Hunter just shrugs and orders another beer. September 20th, 2016, Leo Fitz attempts to prod gently about the whereabouts of his toolbox and receives no reply. October 1st, 2016–”

Jemma can’t take any more of it. She’s been trying to watch The Crown in peace for the past fifteen minutes, accompanied only by her French bulldog Baxter and her order of mango fried rice, and she has absolutely no interest in hearing what happened in October.

“Lance Hunter doesn’t live here,” she informs him crisply as she swings the door open. “He and his girlfriend Bobbi live one street over and three houses down. Are you drunk or do you just have a terrible sense of direction?”

“Neither,” her mystery door-knocker says indignantly and steps into the light. He’s, well…he’s handsome. There’s no other word for it and it’s an absolutely irrelevant train of thought but she can’t stop thinking it. Blue eyes and sandy hair and a determined set to his chin that she finds strangely appealing. “I was filled with righteous anger.”

“Righteous anger?” she asks, quirking an eyebrow at him.

“My toolbox had my sonic screwdriver prototype in it! I worked on the blasted thing for nearly three months before Lance “couldn’t hammer a nail if my life depended on it, mate” Hunter asked to borrow my toolbox and never gave it back.” His cheeks are turning pink as he finishes up his recitation.

“Right then, Mr. righteous anger. Do you want to come inside out of the cold and plan diabolical revenge on them?”


	90. FS + literally colliding into each other

They’re on a train platform when it happens. King’s Cross, to be exact, on a cold November morning with great white clouds of steam puffing out around them and hiding the black gloss of the trains. The air is cold and crisp and carries a hint of pine from somewhere far away and as she drinks it in, Jemma just knows that something good is going to happen.

He’s late, because he always is. He was meant to catch the train to Cambridge that left an hour ago but his alarm clock (it’s a prototype, wires and gears sticking out everywhere) didn’t go off and the Tube got stuck in the tunnel and he’s meant to be giving a tutorial in exactly two and a half hours. It’s not as if his students will be disappointed, precisely—it’s almost the Christmas holidays and they’re all itching to get home. But the dean won’t be happy with him if he misses another tutorial, even though he firmly maintains that the reason he lost track of time in the lab was because his time machine actually worked for a minute there.

She’s early because she always is. She’s reading a paperback book on the platform as she walks towards her train—her worn copy of Vanity Fair—and well, maybe she’s not paying attention as much as she should. For as long as she’s been able to read, she’s been able to read and walk at the same time. Her mother used to scold her whenever she caught her doing it, just like she used to scold her whenever she spotted smears of yellow paint on the hems of her dresses or caught a whiff of turpentine from Jemma’s room. But now Jemma reads and walks whenever she pleases and she lives in a world of paint. Canvases hung on the walls of her tiny flat, aquamarine and lavender caught underneath her fingernails, cadmium red streaked across her palms, pale green staining her floorboards. Right now, as she glances up from her book to check the arrivals board, the world is rearranging itself into shapes and colors, everything dissolving into its component parts.

Until, of course, someone collides into her with the force of a small tank. Her book goes flying. Her purse swings wildly about. And she makes a sudden and unwelcome acquaintance with the ground.

This isn’t the first time he’s collided with someone. At Cambridge, he’s quite infamous for running people down with his bicycle. But it is the first time he’s collided with someone this lovely (and with such excellent taste in books) on a train platform and that’s quite unforgivably rude.

“I’m so sorry,” he blurts out. “I didn’t mean to—are you—can I—”

He trails off when her eyes meet his.

Fitz looks at Jemma. Jemma looks at Fitz. Somewhere, the universe rearranges itself to fit around them.


	91. FS + librarian/reader AU

“Hi there. I, uh—I was wondering if you’ve got any book recommendations for seven-year-old girls?” The cute dad (who can never ever know that the entire children’s library staff refers to him as such) leans over her desk awkwardly, hands shoved into the pockets of his corduroy trousers.

He’s started coming to the library over the past few months, one of the few dads in the midst of the yoga-pant clad mom brigade, and even if he seems a little lost among the tiny chairs and crafting sessions, he still lets his daughter check out as many books as she likes.

“Seven and three quarters old!” A voice says from the other side of Jemma’s desk.

“Seven and three quarters old. Hmmm,” Jemma puts her best thinking face on. “What’s your favorite book right now?”

“I like anything with dragons,” she says stoutly. “Dad does the best voices.”

“Have you read Dealing with Dragons?” she asks.

“You can’t see, but she’s shaking her head,” he says and gives her a sheepish smile.

“Perfect. I’ll make a list of a few other books with dragons in them that you might like.” The minute that Jemma hands the list over, the little girl goes racing off towards the stacks clutching it tightly, her father reminding her not to run behind her. He carefully takes each book that she decides she wants, until he’s got a stack in his arms tall enough to nearly obscure his face

He stops by the desk again when they’re ready to leave. “Thank you,” he says. “I, uh– I’m still figuring out what counts as appropriate reading material. I’m an English professor and I had to hide all my Nabokov from her—she’ll read anything that’s printed—and I keep on worrying that I’m stunting her reading progress. Or packing her an unhealthy lunch or not braiding her hair or—I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be telling you all of this. Sophie’s mom left her with me four months ago—I didn’t even know that Sophie was Sophie until four months ago and I…I really shouldn’t be telling you all of this.”

“I don’t mind,” Jemma says and smiles up at him. “Bring Sophie by anytime. I’d love to find more books for her. I’m Jemma.”

“Fitz.”

The next Sunday, they’re both at the desk, Sophie giving her a gap-toothed grin and clutching a new book and Fitz giving her a shy smile that makes something flare up in her chest.

(It takes her three months to figure out that Daisy told Fitz to come in on all the days that Jemma works.)


	92. One Night Only (FS + becoming pregnant after a one-night stand)

“Daisy, I can’t tell him,” she says and feels the all-too- familiar wave of nausea in her gut rise up.

“Of course you can tell him. Two simple words. Four if you’re feeling really fancy. You don’t have to if you don’t want to,” Daisy adds gently. “But I think he’d want to know. You said he seemed like a nice guy, right?”

“No, I mean that I literally can’t tell him. Because I don’t have his number. Or his address. Or his full name. I mean, I could always take out a skywriting message, but that’s less than ideal,” Jemma snaps. Daisy pushes a cup of peppermint tea and a plate with shortbread on it across the table towards her. She’s only a month into this pregnancy and her best friend’s already figured out the best way to placate her. (Even if she wishes the tea could be caffeinated.)

“Okay, so no skywriting. But there has to be some way to figure out who this guy is, right? Maybe May could run him through the databases at the police station,” Daisy suggests, brightening. “It’d only be the tiniest bit illegal.”

“We’re not doing that,” she says firmly. “Look, I remember that he traveled a lot for his job, so he might not live here. He had a Scottish accent, curly hair, blue eyes, a lot of books in his apartment…I really don’t remember much.”

That’s not quite true. She remembers the look on his face after he kissed her for the first time and the catch in his voice when they were tangled up in his bed and the way he held on to her in the morning. She remembers his smile and his laugh and his sighs. And she remembers the way he made her feel, like something precious and rare. But none of that is going to help her now.

Lena Marie Simmons is born on May 16th. There’s only one name in the parents section of the birth certificate but Jemma’s hospital room is crowded with people. Daisy, who drove her to the hospital, Bobbi, who went to all the birthing classes with her and coaches her through twenty-nine hours of labor, Phil, who comes bearing a stuffed bear that’s bigger than Lena herself, Melinda, who arrives halfway through and lets Jemma squeeze her hand until it turns white with the pressure, Hunter, who pulls ridiculous faces at the baby, and Elena and Mack, who volunteer their babysitting services anytime she wants.

“You’re going to spoil her, you know,” she says, laughing, after Bobbi pulls out yet another set of presents for the baby.

“We’re going to spoil you, too,” Bobbi tells her. “Whatever you need, we’ll be here.”

Lena Marie Simmons spends the first seven years of her life without a dad. Instead, she spends them with one set of adopted grandparents, three honorary aunts and three honorary uncles, and one sort-of cousin. Jemma is grateful for each and every one of them.

Lena’s seven when Daisy finds Fitz’s phone number. “He’s a photographer,” Daisy tells Jemma over brunch. “I saw his photo credit in the Times so I emailed their offices and pretended that I was looking for a freelance photographer for a travel assignment. And they sent me his contact info.”

Daisy slides a printout of an email across the table towards her. “You don’t have to use it if you don’t want to. But I thought you should have it,” she adds. “Just in case.”

Jemma doesn’t touch the paper for the rest of their brunch but she folds it up and slips it into her bag when it’s time to leave. Then she just stares at it. And stares at it some more. Leo Fitz. One name, a short email address, a string of ten numbers. What does she possibly have to lose?

Jemma breathes, makes a quick wish, and picks up the phone.


	93. Amateur matchmaking (FS + single parents AU)

The muffins look homemade if she squints. And it’s not like they’re cheap supermarket muffins. She went to a real bakery and bought carrot muffins for an exorbitant sum of money and then she shoved them in a plastic Tupperware container so they looked authentic. And if any of the other parents make comments about it (like they did the time she let Andrew do his science fair project by himself or when she was three minutes late to the annual non-denominational holiday show), she can tell them exactly where they can put their vegan gluten-free beet chocolate chip cookies.

“You have all your homework, right?” she asks as they pull up to the school. “And the muffins for the bake sale?”

“Yup!” Andrew says cheerfully. “Can I eat one of the muffins before class?”

“Nope. Have a banana instead.”

“Emma’s dad lets her have PopTarts all the time.” Andrew has that squinty expression on his face that he always gets when he tries to be cunning.

“Well, Emma’s dad is going to have to pay massive dentist bills. Even if he did help her build that terrarium.” Jemma gave a little sigh at the thought of it. The terrarium had been truly spectacular—perfectly engineered, charmingly designed, and filled with native plants. She had very nearly asked for one of her own.

 

“Andrew’s mum works in a lab,” his daughter tells him. “She told the class all about in last Thursday. But I told Andrew that your lab is much better because you work with rockets.”

“Well, what does Andrew’s mum work with?” Fitz asks. This is probably the time for him to instill some kind of lesson about how every kind of work is important and interesting but for all he knows, Andrew’s mum could be a psychologist, asking people about their feelings and running rats through mazes. (Load of rot, psychology.)

“Plants. She taught us all about poisonous ones. She’s really pretty,” Emma adds in what’s seemingly a non-sequitur but what Fitz suspects is actually another one of her glaringly transparent attempts to get him to go out with someone. He never should have let Daisy show her Sleepless in Seattle.

“Look, Andrew’s right over there! Let’s go meet them.” And before Fitz can say anything, his daughter has a shockingly strong grip on his wrist (he blames May for that one) and is dragging him over to where a small boy is receiving a lunch that seems to be largely composed of kale. “Ms. Simmons, this is my dad,” Emma announces and deposits him in front of Andrew’s extremely pretty mother. “He’s a scientist too. His lab is probably fancier than yours, but that’s okay.”

“Leo Fitz,” he says. “My lab isn’t really that fancy. I work with rockets over at Space X. I mean, it’ll be fancy when we actually manage successfully to launch one but…”

“Jemma Simmons. I’m a botanist over at Berkeley.” She glances down at the brown paper bag of donuts Emma is clutching in one hand. “So you didn’t have time to make anything for the bake sale neither?”

“The bake—yup. Right. The bake sale. I’m a decent baker, actually, but things have been crazy around the house lately.” Fitz decides to omit the fact that he and Emma bought the donuts on the way to school. “We’ll have to transfer them into something less obvious right, Emma?”

“I’ve already got the container, Daddy,” she chirps and beams up at him and Jemma Simmons. She probably thinks her diabolical plan is working. “Can I go to class now?”

“I’ll see you after school.” Fitz bends down to hug her, letting her grab on to him like a monkey. “Don’t forget to do better than everyone else on the math test today!”

Emma shoots him a smile and then she’s off, Andrew racing into the school behind her, and he’s left with the woman who seems to be getting prettier every time he looks at her. “You know, I’ve always been interested in the physics of rocketry,” she says. “I’d love to hear about it sometime.”

“How about right now?” he blurts out. “I know a great coffee place in the Mission.”

After a moment, she nods, smiling at him, and Fitz barely resists the urge to high-five someone in victory.


	94. FS + Moulin Rouge AU

Fitz moves to Paris because it’s the thing to do when you’re twenty-three and lost and your head is full of words that won’t shape themselves into sentences. He finds a one-room attic apartment with a leaky roof and drafty windows, and lives off bread and cheese and the occasional glass of sweet-bitter absinthe and wanders the stony streets of Paris hunched against the wind that blows straight through his too-thin coat. But the bread tastes better than anything he’s ever had before and stories lurk around every corner of the city and his apartment may be small, but it looks out over the cream rooftops and curled iron railings of the city. And if he leans all the way out, he can see the bright wheel of the Moulin Rouge. 

That’s where he first sees her. There’s novels hiding in the curve of her smile and the sadness in her eyes, poems trailing along behind the edges of her dress, metaphors twisted along her wrists and and final lines clasped around her neck. She’s the most expensive woman in Paris. She’s the only surviving daughter of an old aristocratic family. She’s a child who grew up on the streets and charmed her way onto the stage of the Moulin Rouge. She’s beautiful and she’s tragic and she’s something different for everyone who sees her. And all Fitz wants is just to see her.

“I’m going to write a hundred stories about you,” he tells her when they finally meet, him perched on the roof of the Moulin Rouge, her leaning out on her balcony. “Comedies and tragedies and mysteries and love stories.”

“Oh, darling,” she says and laughs, the edges of it broken glass. “You couldn’t afford to write even one sentence about me.”


	95. FS + "best friend's younger sibling AU"

Jemma’s pretty sure that hooking up with your best friend’s little brother is definitively off limits. Older brothers are equally off limits, but at least older brothers are generally considered to be hot. It’s almost understandable. Covertly making out with her best friend Bobbi’s younger brother Fitz in a coat closet at a party where Bobbi is undoubtedly looking for her right now…she doesn’t even understand why she’s doing it.

Although the way Fitz’s kisses seem to make her knees give way beneath her might have something to do with it. He’s currently kissing his way down her neck as he presses her up against the wall of the closet, her legs wrapped around his waist and her hands tugging a little in his hair when he nips gently at her pulse point.

“How did you get so good at this?” she demands. “You never dated anyone when we were in high school.”

“So you noticed who I dated in high school?” he whispers, grinning.

She would deny it but she’s too busy kissing him. 

“I did research, okay?” he admits when they finally break apart. “Proper scientific research, not what you’re thinking. I read things about consent and female sexuality and a few ridiculous Cosmo articles but I—I wanted to be sure that when the right person happened, I’d be able to do it all properly.”

“You’re a dork,” she tells him lightly but her heart is racing a million miles an hour. “So tell me, who was this right person going to be?”

For a moment, he just looks at her, the blue of his eyes so dark that they’re almost indigo, and her breath catches in her throat and she wonders if–

“Karen Gillian, of course,” he says and she rolls her eyes so hard at him that they nearly go to the back of her head.

“Less talking, more kissing,” she informs him. Fitz is happy to oblige.


	96. Quakerider + roommates AU

“You found him on Craigslist?!” Jemma hisses. 

“Nope. I found him on Facebook. He’s a friend of a friend.” Daisy pauses, reconsiders. “Of a friend.”

“But you don’t know anything about him! What if he’s a murderer?” Jemma says in her best perfectly reasonable voice, like people murder their roommates every day. “You could forget to clean up the kitchen or use too much broadband and snap! He starts putting cyanide in your cereal.”

“Jem? Does your latest novel by any chance feature a murderous roommate?” Daisy asks. Jemma writes murder mysteries, most of them featuring the intrepid 1940’s detective-for-hire Peggy Carter, and sometimes when she’s in the midst of a new book, she gets a little…caught up in it. They’re still banned from Universal Studios after the time she thought the ride operator was messing with the controls.

“Maybe,” Jemma mumbles.

“Look, I promise that my new roommate is not a murderer. Or a con man, or a jewel thief, or whatever else your mind comes up with next.” She doesn’t mention the fact that she’s pretty sure he competes in illegal street races at night.

She finally gets Jemma to leave with a promise to call her if her cereal starts tasting funny.

 

Honestly, she’s still not quite sure what to make of Robbie Reyes. On the surface, he’s an ideal roommate—she doesn’t even see him much. He’s a second year law student at UCLA, so he spends most of time studying in the library and when he is in the apartment, he’s usually bent over a textbook in his room or eating dinner out of takeout containers in the kitchen. He’s quiet and clean and always washes his dishes and she’s actually heard him described as boring by one of their neighbors.

But he comes back late at night smelling faintly of gasoline and salt air and there’s a silver-streaked leather jacket hanging up in his closet and sometimes, when she’s dressed to go out with her friends and breezes past him in the kitchen, there’s a look in his eyes that makes her shiver. In a good way. She thinks that there might be another Robbie Reyes lurking underneath the surface and she kind of wants to meet him.

And when she sees the car parked in front of their building—sleek and black and capable of going from zero to sixty in three seconds flat—she knows that she needs to hear more.

“So is the car out front yours?” she asks him, pulling herself up onto the kitchen counters while he’s eating warmed-over pizza.

“It’s mine now.” He shrugs and doesn’t say anything else. “Inherited it from my uncle, spent a while fixing it up, drove it around the city.”

“The traffic doesn’t drive you crazy?” She hates driving in LA with the force of a thousand fiery suns but at least her van is big enough to scare off the annoying mini Coopers and convertibles.

“Traffic’s not a problem.”

“Because you drive at night? I saw a mural downtown,” she blurts out. “Of some street racers. And there’s a picture on it that looks a lot like you. You look good in it, just so you know.”

Robbie goes still, eyes dark, his breathing fast in the silence of the kitchen. They’re staring at each other, only a few feet apart, and she’s strangely conscious of him in a way she wasn’t before. Of how long it would take her to reach him, how his hands might feel around her waist, the way his mouth might catch against her own. 

“So what do you want? I’ll park the car away from here, make sure I’m quieter when I come back in next time, start l–”

“That’s not what I want at all,” Daisy says quickly and moves forward off the counter to stand in front of him, close enough that she can count the freckles scattered across his face. “Next time? I want you to take me with you.”


	97. Quakerider + soulmates AU

Most people get small marks. Neat symbols stamped just above their hips, perfectly curled cursive wrapping around their wrists, delicate pencil drawings inked precisely above their hearts. The lucky ones get marks that are easy to decipher, arrows guiding them straight, obvious enough that it’s practically a neon light flashing off their wrist. Turn left, soulmate here!

Robbie Reyes is not one of the lucky ones. On his fifteenth birthday, he wakes up with a series of jagged lines etched across his chest. The mark is massive, stretching all the way down to his hips and streaking high enough that it’s visible above the collars of his shirts, and people don’t have the good sense to shut up about it when they see it. His brother Gabe is convinced that the marks exactly mirror the mountains of the Sierra Nevada, his grandmother thinks that it’s a heartbeat and he’ll meet a nice girl who’s studying to be a doctor, and he’s afraid that they’re scars. 

He’s twenty-three when a decent-sized earthquake hits the valley and the newspapers talk about it for days. That’s when he realizes it. The marks on his chest aren’t a heartbeat or a mountain or any of the million other possibilities he’s considered. They’re a seismograph.

 

 

Daisy Johnson has arms covered in flames and if she ever finds her soulmate, she’s going to give him a massive lecture about being subtle. The marks cover her arms completely, from her shoulders to her wrists, and some people think that she’s just got cool tattoos but other people crack jokes about her meeting a firefighter or speculate endlessly about what they might mean. She wears her leather jacket all year round, sleeves pulled firmly down and bracelets stacked on her wrist in case the jacket slips. Because she’s been in love and lust and like and it’s ended badly every damn time. She’s not interested in seeing just how much she can screw up her soulmate. 

She’s careful about it and generally people understand. Jemma, with the dainty chemical element on her wrist that matches Fitz’s perfectly, buys her cozy long-sleeved cardigans and Mack finds her a stack of leather bracelets after her silver ones jangle on their first mission together. Even Lincoln only glimpsed the marks on her arms once or twice in daylight and she cut him off before he could ask her anything else. But the first time that she meets Robbie Reyes, the cuff of her jacket slips up half an inch and his eyes go wide. 

“What do you have on your arm?” he asks her in the bay of the Quinjet, still looking pale and drawn after being sucked through to another dimension and back again.

“Nothing,” she says. “A tattoo.”

“If it was a tattoo, you wouldn’t keep it covered up all the time. Look,” he says when she doesn’t respond. “I understand if you don’t want to talk about it. But I–” He stops, sighs, and then he unzips his leather jacket. There’s lines crawling up from underneath his shirt and spidering across his chest and she has to fist her hands at her sides to keep from reaching out to touch them.

“What are they?” she breathes.

“Seismograph readings.”

“They’re beautiful.” She does reach out then, hand lightly skimming along his collarbone, and she can feel his sharp intake of breath underneath her hand. He brings a hand up to twist his fingers briefly through hers and the cuff of her jacket slides up again.

“Can I see?” he says quietly and she shrugs off the jacket and pushes up one sleeve of her shirt. The flames are as vivid as ever, reds and oranges and yellows and the occasional icy blue swarming over her arms and Robbie looks at them with an amazement that she’s never seen before.

“Fire and earthquakes,” she tells him. “People say it’s a dangerous combination.”

“Maybe,” he shrugs. “But I think it might be beautiful too.”

And just maybe, he’s right.


	98. FS + amnesia

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This takes place in the same universe as my fic Lost and Found.

“Jemma? Why are you up so late?”

Jemma slams her laptop shut when she hears Skye approach behind her. It’s not that what she’s doing is forbidden, exactly. It’s just…quixotic. Impossible, according to the SHIELD doctors who treated him. Quite probably a waste of her time. She can’t bring herself to care.

“Research,” she says with a shrug and hopes Skye leaves it at that.

“About amnesia? Look, I—I understand but you heard Doctor Cho,” Skye says gently and goes to perch beside Jemma on the couch. “He doesn’t even remember that he works for SHIELD.”

“That doesn’t mean he can’t remember me.”

They won’t let her into his room yet, but the moment that they do, she’ll bring in photos and videos and device blueprints and even a container of homemade pesto aioli. She’ll look into more experimental techniques and memory restoration therapies and every crackpot theory that’s out there. Because she refuses to believe that there’s a version of their lives where they exist without each other. Because he’s stamped onto every last inch of her brain and she knows it’s the same for him.

Because she’s getting him back, no matter what.


	99. Quakerider + partners in crime

“So are you ever going to let me drive your car again?” she asks him, legs draped across his lap as she idly winds the diamond necklace they just lifted around her wrist. (Admittedly, someone else stole it first. They’re just returning it to its rightful owner.)

“And get stuck in traffic with a stolen Rembrandt again?” Robbie raises one eyebrow at her and tugs her a little closer. They’re pulled over by the beach waiting for their contact, windows rolled all the way down and sunshine streaming through, and they may be technically be on the run from a crazed mob boss, but she feels strangely content.

“It’s LA,” Daisy shrugs. “There’s always traffic. And last time, you said my driving was ‘fair enough’.”

“By which I mean that you didn’t get us killed.” He’d only let her drive the charger because he’d broken his wrist during the heist and he gave her directions the whole way through.

“You could give me lessons in the charger.” She glances up at him through her lashes and grins wickedly. “Teach me when to start and stop.”

“Remember what happened the last time I tried to teach you how to drive the charger?”

“Vividly.” Daisy leans over to kiss him, long and slow, and feels him sigh against her mouth. He pulls her closer, all the way into his lap, and she goes eagerly, kissing him the whole time. “But I think I could still use a reminder.”

“As you wish,” he says lightly and kisses her again.

It’s such an un-Robbie thing to say—they’d watched The Princess Bride last week, cooped up in a hotel between jobs—and for a moment she wonders if—They don’t talk about whatever this is between them but something burns bright and steady in her chest whenever she looks at him and from the way he looks back, she thinks that he might want her in the same way.

But Daisy doesn’t say anything. At least not right now. That can come after they steal back the Vermeer.


	100. Quakerider + long distance relationship AU

Daisy doesn’t call him after they leave LA. She could, theoretically, if she was willing to mask her phone number and do some discreet hacking to find his number. She could do a lot of things. But calling is—calling is something. Calling means closing the inch of space between them the day that she said goodbye. They’d been so close, standing on the ramp of the quinjet. (Too close.) She could have kissed him. (But the last boy she kissed is floating somewhere above the stars.)

So instead she sends him postcards. Bright and loud and so cheesy that he probably rolls his eyes whenever he gets them. She sends him neon signs from Las Vegas, people wearing berets and carrying baguettes from Paris, walls spattered with graffiti from Berlin, sandy beaches from the Seychelles, kangaroos from Australia. And she writes a sentence or two on the back of each one—jokes and random details and things she thinks he’d like. She never signs her name but she’s pretty sure he knows it’s her. (Sometimes she sends postcards to Gabe too, asking him how Robbie’s doing, with his endless list of scores to settle.)

They’re in Hawaii when she writes that she misses him. A week later, a postcard appears at the hotel where they’re staying on Kauai. Life’s a lot less interesting without you around.

She shows up at the garage in the middle of the workday, when she really shouldn’t be there. He drops what he’s doing anyway. “I thought I wouldn’t send a postcard this time,” she calls and takes a step towards him.

“I like the postcards,” he says. “But I like you in person better.”

“We’ve gotten a tip about some strange things out of San Francisco,” she offers. “It’s not too far from LA when you’ve got a jet.”

“I’ve never seen the Golden Gate Bridge, you know. Damn shame. You should do something about that.”

This time, she closes the inch between them.


	101. Quakerider + neighbors AU

Her van gives out a week after Daisy moves into her new apartment. (Maybe Jemma was right about not moving all of her stuff cross town at once.) When she turns the key in the ignition, all she gets is a wheezing death rattle and when she pops open the hood to take a look at the engine, it’s such a mess of parts and wires, most of them puffing smoke, that she doesn’t even know where to start. So she swears at it instead.

It’s very satisfying.

“What’d the car ever do to you?” someone says from behind her and she spins around to find Apartment 6A smirking at her. He lives down the hall from her but she’s only seen him a handful of times, bringing his groceries in or tossing his car keys high in the air as he heads out for the night. Not that she’s been hoping to see him or anything. She realizes with a little shock that Apartment 6A is kind of hot when he smirks.

“Only betrayed me when I needed it most,” she says and glares down at the engine again.

“What’s wrong with it? I worked part time in a garage when I was in school,” he says when she gives him a dubious look. “I might be able to figure out what’s going on.”

“I’ve had it looked at by a mechanic.” Technically, Fitz is an engineer but he knows all about combustion and physics and if she buys him Scotch, he’ll usually keep her car going for another month or so. “A sort of mechanic.”

“See, I’m a real mechanic.”

Finally, she sighs, steps aside, and lets him look at her van’s engine. The expression on his face is one of utter horror. “Is that duct tape?” he asks slowly.

“Maybe.” It’s definitely duct tape.

“What the hell were you thinking? I can fix it,” he adds quickly. “It’ll just take me a few days.”

“So why you’d offer to fix your neighbor’s car?” Daisy asks later that day, after he’s given her a ride to and from work and she’s standing next to him in the garage, watching him poke carefully at the bits and pieces of the engine and frown whenever there’s another puff of steam, all his focus . She can’t help wondering what that kind of concentration would be like in…other places. Well, she could. But she doesn’t exactly want to.

“Can’t hear anyone swearing at a car like that. Besides, my brother would never let me live it down if I missed the chance to talk to the pretty girl next door.”

He glances up to grin at her. Her heart thumps a little faster.


	102. FS + long distance relationship AU

“You’ve been writing to him for two years and he doesn’t know who you are?” Bobbi asks and takes a pointed sip of her tea. Jemma simply flushes and seals up another letter.

“Miss Flowers promised that she’d write to him and then failed to hold up her end of the promise. And he sent her such lovely letters—I thought that it would be a waste for them to go unanswered,” Jemma says defensively. “Besides, Mr. Fitz knows all sorts of things about me. My favorite books and my experiments and my thoughts and beliefs and hopes—he knows all the things that matter. He just doesn’t know that it’s me.”

“Or that you’re in love with him,” Bobbi points out delicately.

“Love’s quite a strong word to use, isn’t it?” Jemma bends her head over her embroidery and rapidly steers the conversation on to another subject. If Mr. Fitz is in love with anyone, it’s Miss Flowers, with her enchanting smile and quick wit. Miss Flowers, the toast of London society. (Not Jemma, with her strange habits and elderly father and massive hunting hounds that are too afraid to hunt.) And when he comes home from the war, he’ll never need to know that the woman who promised to write him and the woman who actually did were two different people.

Unfortunately, she fails to account for Mr. Fitz’s opinion in all this. He bursts into her drawing room completely unannounced one fine Tuesday six months later and demands to know who really wrote him the letters.

Jemma’s mind, although normally quite reliable in crises such as these, completely fails her. It summons up an elaborate story involving rabbits. And then it tells her to flee.


	103. Fitzsimmons + Jacobean era England

Jemma isn’t supposed to go to the theater. Especially not the outdoor theaters on the South Bank, where mud stains the hems of her fine skirts and commoners heckle the actors if the action isn’t sufficiently bloody and women peddle everything they have to offer amongst the audience. Even the indoor candle-lit theaters that have been appearing all over London aren’t considered quite proper for a young lady of her status. If she is so lucky as to glimpse a play, it will be one of Mr. Jonson’s masques at court, with their elaborate sets and pretty words. Jemma has even played a role in one or two of them, costumed in a stiff embroidered gown and moving in careful circles around her partner.

But here there are none of Inigo Jones’ machines. No courtiers whispering gossip in between the actors’ lines. No references to King James meant to make His Majesty’s dour face break into a smile. Here there is only the nearly bare stage and the actors’ words and Jemma can’t look away.

She’s seen the young actor playing Henry V before, as Sebastian in Twelfth Night and Benvolio in Romeo and Juliet, and no matter how small the part, she can’t seem to stop watching them. He speaks the words as if he truly understands every syllable, blue eyes shining, and Jemma can’t help wondering what it might be like to have him speak those words to her. If he might even write poetry of his own.

Noble young women don’t speak to actors. They certainly don’t seek them out by the door to the tiring house. But Jemma’s never felt more alive than when she’s watching him on stage, like she wants to eat up every word he utters.

“I—I’ve seen you before in the audience,” he blurts out when his eyes land upon her, standing there in the straw and the muck.

“I’ve seen you before on stage,” she replies. “You’re quite good. Extraordinary, in fact.”

He doesn’t reply. Instead, he bends over her hand and kisses it. It’s the barest brush of lips and it burns her even through her glove, sending electricity racing through her.

“Leo Fitz,” he breathes. “Actor. At your service, milady.”


End file.
